--- title: "A Russian silver hoard doubles the world supply of a rare Swedish coin" description: "Two kilograms of medieval silver, one provisional dirham and a maybe-Odin medallion" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-04T21:38:40Z modified: 2026-10-05T01:08:24Z url: https://rews.cc/a/a-russian-silver-hoard-doubles-the-world-supply-of-a-rare-sw-bf73e4 language: en tags: ["archaeology", "history", "russia", "sweden", "coins", "europe"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # A Russian silver hoard doubles the world supply of a rare Swedish coin *Two kilograms of medieval silver, one provisional dirham and a maybe-Odin medallion* By Nate Ledger · October 4, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-russian-silver-hoard-doubles-the-world-supply-of-a-rare-sw-bf73e4 ## In brief - A hoard of more than two kilograms of silver was found at Tiversky Gorodok in the Leningrad region - Two Uppsala-type bracteates double the known world examples of the type from two to four - An Arab dirham is provisionally dated AD 907–912, but has so far been examined only in photographs - A medallion may depict Odin’s ravens, a hypothesis researchers stress is not confirmed - The burial is provisionally dated to the late 12th or 13th century; its owner and motive are unknown The excavation at Tiversky Gorodok, a medieval fortified settlement in Russia’s Leningrad region, began as unglamorous work on sections of the site that had suffered damage. Then, as Oguz Buyukyildirim reports for Arkeonews, the ground produced more than two kilograms of silver: coins, medallions, chains and ornaments that researchers describe as richer in composition than any comparable find from northwestern Russia. A senior researcher involved, Belsky of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called the moment the kind of event archaeologists rarely expect to witness during an excavation. Start with the coins, because the coins contain the story’s strangest statistic. Three stand out. The oldest is an Arab dirham provisionally dated to between AD 907 and 912 — and the hedging matters, because researchers have so far examined it only through photographs, so the identification remains preliminary. The other two are large Uppsala-type bracteates: thin coins struck on only one side, produced in Sweden between the late 11th century and the first half of the 12th century. Here is the statistic. Before this discovery, exactly two examples of this particular type of bracteate were known to exist anywhere, and both were preserved in Uppsala, Sweden. The Tiversky coins take the known total to four. One salvage dig in the Priozersky district has doubled the documented world supply of a coin type. Imagine, purely for scale, that the entire confirmed supply of some asset sat in a single museum, and then someone doubled it with a shovel. Belsky described the bracteates as exceptionally rare, which is what a doubling of supply looks like when the denominator is two. The rest of the hoard is jewellery, mostly, and it travelled. It includes several circular medallions decorated with granulation and filigree, a large ornamented silver neck ring, coin pendants, fine wire chains, a ring, a horseshoe-shaped fibula, a Karelian-type head ornament and a leather headband. The craftsmanship, researchers say, is exceptionally high, and their preliminary assessment is that many pieces were produced elsewhere — in medieval Rus or Scandinavia — before reaching the settlement. The expedition provisionally dates the burial to the second half of the 12th or the 13th century, while individual objects are considerably older, meaning some pieces apparently circulated or stayed in families for generations before someone finally hid the lot. A hoard like this is, among other things, a multi-generational balance sheet. One medallion poses a riddle the researchers are handling carefully. It shows two birds flanking a central element, and the team is considering whether the birds could be Huginn and Muninn, the ravens of the Norse god Odin, with the object between them possibly representing Gungnir, Odin’s spear. That is a hypothesis, not an identification, and the source is careful to say so. What makes it odd is the company it keeps: objects bearing apparently Christian symbolism occur in the same deposit. Belsky said researchers still cannot explain the combination, which may simply mean the hoard documents a society where objects, beliefs and artistic traditions crossed cultural boundaries without asking permission. The geography explains the mix better than any theory does. Tiversky Gorodok sits near the Vuoksa water system, and in the Middle Ages these waterways connected communities around Lake Ladoga with the Baltic and territories farther east. This was not an isolated frontier; it was a zone where Karelian communities interacted with Novgorod and Scandinavian networks. So a single hole in the ground can plausibly contain an early 10th-century Arab dirham, rare Swedish royal-adjacent coinage, Scandinavian-style imagery and locally meaningful Karelian ornaments, because the river system was the supply chain. The site has been excavated for more than a century, and an 1890 hoard found there contained ornaments, a chain, silver ingots and eastern coins. Who assembled the silver, and why they buried it, remains unknown. Conservation and further study may pin down where individual objects were made and refine the burial date. The work is being carried out by specialists from the Kunstkamera, as the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography is better known, together with the St. Petersburg research centre Actual Archaeology. Someone once treated this deposit as the safest available storage and never came back for it. Several centuries of zero interest later, the withdrawal was made by numismatists, and it paid out in a doubled corpus.