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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Only a Poor Old Man, post: 5365014, member: 111037&quot;]I know we are in 2021 now, but technically this latest addition of mine is my last coin of 2020 rather than the first of 2021. This is because the coin has been in my possession for a few days now, and I spent much of the Christmas break carefully giving it a much needed clean up. But the funniest thing is that I never intended on buying this coin... It happened purely by accident and because of my total lack of experience in buying through online auctions. Until this one, 100% of my coins were bought from retail dealers. I was auction-phobic probably for a good reason as I kinda messed up this one. I thought I would give it a try as everyone else seems to be buying mainly from auctions, and also because the retailers stock seemed to have run out of coins I was interested in. </p><p><br /></p><p>As I had no experience whatsoever, I wanted to place a test bid a few days before the end of the auction to see how the system worked. However I didn&#039;t want to bid on the coin I was really interested in as I wanted to keep the price low till the last moment and also avoid attracting attention to it. So I placed a bid on this coin simply because my cursor was closest to it. It had a current bid of £240 with an estimate of £400, so my bid was £260. As I knew that usually the coins in auctions go for much more than the estimate, I never imagined that this would be the actual winning bid. The last day of the auction came, and my bid was still the winning one but I didn&#039;t pay any attention to that.</p><p><br /></p><p>Soon it became quite apparent that the coin I really desired was out of reach as it quickly surpassed the amount I was willing to spent on it. When there was only a few minutes left and my bid was still the top one on the test coin, I was still not worried as I expected the amount to jump in the last few seconds as it usually does. But then... 3, 2, 1, hammered at £260!!! I won a coin with my first and only bid, but unfortunately that was hardly my intention!</p><p><br /></p><p>So what did I win? A Byzantine aspron trachy from the troubled 13th century. Specifically one from the empire of Nicaea that was minted during the times of Theodore Comnenus-Laskaris. Very interesting coin, but in poor state of preservation with a chunk of it missing as is often the case with these coins. Here it is what it looked like when I got it:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1228099[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Why it never got anywhere near the estimate? Was the missing chunk a turn-off for most collectors? Did I pay too much for it? Hopefully one of you may have an answer.</p><p>It comes with a provenance as it is from the Vitangelo collection. I couldn&#039;t find out much about it though, so if anyone has any additional info it would be much appreciated. When it arrived it looked interesting enough with a good level of detail, but its condition bothered me. As it wasn&#039;t a coin I really desired, I probably felt more willing to try and clean it up a bit, so I spent a good part of the holidays in trying to bring the detail out and make it look nice. There were a few scary moments, but in the end I think I did a good job. Here is the end result:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1228100[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>So what do you think? Personally I now feel it is a rather nice coin with a good level of detail and the missing bit doesn&#039;t bother me that much. Now I need to do some</p><p>research on the empire of Nicaea as it is an area that I haven&#039;t read much about. </p><p><br /></p><p>Show me your Nicaea coins or any coins that you end up buying by mistake![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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