My grandfather owned a vending machine company and got many old coins which I now have. Who puts a coin from 1600s Nuremberg into a vending machine in Baltimore? I have identified all the lot but this one. It has a sickly looking crowned double eagle. The letters, which look Greek to me although only several are visible, are interspersed with asterisks or some other five pointed symbol. (Looks too rounded to be a star.) The reverse has a cross formee or similar with another cross behind it and which might be a lion rampant on a small shield. I made a drawing. The picture is somewhat blurry but I think it is clear what I meant. The question marks obviously signify I couldn't make a reasonable guess as to what that character was. The actual coin appears at right. http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/2076/eaglecoin.jpg Any advice about where to go to to ID this coin would also be appreciated.
You might try focusing the camera, and posting the resulting picture in an upright orientation. Typically the double-headed eagle is on Austro-Hungarian, Russian or Polish coins.
My camera is awful, so I altered the image on the computer, which threw off the coloring but it's sharper and upright now.
From the sketch, it looks like you might have a Russian Tzarist coin...? Send Siberian Man a message and see if he can help you out. Note that you could have a medal and not a coin.
Found the answer After dozens of google searches, "medieval Austrian coins" paid off. It's a 1489 Austrian kreuzer. I literally found this in a can of slugs and amusement tokens so I'm pretty excited.
Great! Glad to hear you found it and did the investigative work yourself! Always a good way to learn about something. Congrats on your find! :thumb: Can you also try to post a focused image so we can see the coin?
Not long ago I was trying to ID some double-headed eagle coins and was surprised by how many countries used that symbol. I knew it was Russian, but it's also Austria and several of the Yugoslavian countries too. I think one of them was Bulgarian. The differences are very minor.
