THE THEORIES ABOUT MINTING THE COINS BY UKRAINIAN HETMANS

Abstract

There was an active scholarly discussion in the numismatic circles of Ukraine regarding the possibility of minting at the initiative of the Cossack hetmans their own coins at the beginning of the 20th century. However, such coins have not been discovered, and multiple mentions of them in print sources of information remain only the basis for various hypotheses. To the coins, which could be hypothetically minted by the order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, we can conditionally refer the imitations of poltoraks, made with the use of silver. Unfortunately, the plans of Ivan Vyhovsky to mint in Kyiv the coins of the Grand Principality of Rus’, which were similar to the Polish-Lithuanian coins, have not materialized. We assume that the coins minted at the initiative and on behalf of Petro Doroshenko could be coins of average face-value, made of silver. In our deep conviction, the fact of the money emission on the assignment of the Cossack hetmans is indisputable, as evidenced by the analysis of newly found Ukrainian treasures, which includes coins, probably, minted by hetmans. However, taking into account a drastic increase of numismatic treasure material, that was found by private searchers over the last almost 20 years, it has become possible to develop the issue of minting by Ukrainian hetmans their own coins. Although the results of official archaeological searches conducted on the sites of Cossack settlements, in the Bogoroditsky Fortress and at the place of the Battle of Berestechko, on the territory of the fortress in Zhabotin and on Khortytsia island, had not given science the finds of the desired own coin of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. We assume that, apparently, coins minted at the initiative and on behalf of the Ukrainian hetmans could have been coins of average face-value made of silver. We have imposed silver false coins of trojak and shestak into scientific circulation in a catalog composed together with E. Zamekhovsky and I. Ermachenko, dedicated to the stamped varieties of coins of these nominals. There was collected a number of previously unknown numismatic science varieties of these coins with a reproduction of the design of individual elements of the field and the presentation of variants of the legend in this mentioned edition. This catalog also allows