---
title: "Six Arab coins turn up near the Baltic’s lost trading city"
description: "Dirhams found in a Polish forest add a small gleam to the story of Truso, the Viking-age emporium misplaced for 400 years"
author: "Albion Grey"
published: 2026-09-27T21:06:38Z
modified: 2026-09-28T02:11:52Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/six-arab-coins-turn-up-near-the-baltic-s-lost-trading-city-1f6892
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "viking", "trade", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Six Arab coins turn up near the Baltic’s lost trading city

*Dirhams found in a Polish forest add a small gleam to the story of Truso, the Viking-age emporium misplaced for 400 years*

By Albion Grey · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/six-arab-coins-turn-up-near-the-baltic-s-lost-trading-city-1f6892

## In brief

- Six ninth-century Arab dirhams and two silver fragments were found during a legal search in the Młynary Forest District near Elbląg
- The find lies close to Truso, a Viking-age trading settlement whose location eluded scholars for nearly 400 years until 1981
- Jakub Jagodziński of the Elbląg museum says the coins may have circulated until around 1000 and could be merchants’ silver or toll collectors’ takings
- The coins have yet to receive numismatic analysis, so their mints, rulers and time in circulation remain unknown
- The Elbląg museum will conserve and study the coins and examine the discovery site before putting them on display

Of all the places to drop your change, a forest near Elbląg in northern Poland seems an unlikely spot for a ninth-century Arab merchant. Yet a legal search of the Młynary Forest District has turned up six early medieval Arab dirhams, along with fragments of two more silver coins, dated by specialists to the first half of the ninth century. The coins have gone to the Archaeological and Historical Museum in Elbląg, which plans to conserve them, study them and inspect the site where they lay. Their significance lies less in the eight pieces of silver than in where they were found: a short distance from Truso, a trading settlement so thoroughly lost for so long that the museum itself has likened it to Troy or Atlantis.

Truso existed on paper for centuries before it existed on a map. Around the end of the ninth century, an Anglo-Saxon traveller named Wulfstan sailed from Hedeby, in what is now northern Germany, to Truso near the mouth of the Vistula; his account of the voyage was folded into a geographical work prepared at the court of Alfred the Great. Then the settlement vanished. When Richard Hakluyt published Wulfstan’s narrative in 1598, antiquarians began hunting for the city. They hunted for almost 400 years. Only in 1981 did the archaeologist Marek F. Jagodziński identify the remains near Janów Pomorski, on the eastern shore of Lake Druzno. Decades of digging followed, revealing houses, workshops, jewellery, weapons, gaming pieces and religious objects—and showing that Scandinavians had played a large part in founding and peopling the place.

## Silver carries further than ships

The newly found dirhams fit a familiar pattern. During the Viking Age Arab silver flowed into northern and eastern Europe in enormous quantities, much of it minted in the Abbasid world and passed through many hands over thousands of kilometres before washing up in Baltic trading posts. Earlier finds associated with Truso include imports from the Arab Caliphate alongside goods from England and the Rhineland. By the time a dirham reached the Baltic, its worth lay as much in its metal as in the authority stamped upon it.

Jakub Jagodziński of the Elbląg museum suggests the coins could have circulated long after minting—perhaps until the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Truso itself was winding down. He offers two readings: the silver may have been carried by merchants bound for the settlement, or it may have belonged to Prussian guards who levied tolls on the routes leading there. Neither can be proved, and the coins have yet to undergo specialist numismatic analysis, so their mints and rulers remain unknown.

Truso belonged to a chain of emporia that included Hedeby, Birka and Staraya Ladoga, stitching the Baltic to western Europe and to routes running deep into Eurasia. Dirhams found across northern Europe are among the clearest material traces of that traffic. For now the Młynary coins keep their secrets: where they were struck, whose names they bear and how long they passed from palm to palm. Conservators and specialists in early medieval coinage will examine them before they go on public display. Whether they belonged to a travelling merchant, a toll collector or someone else entirely may never be settled. But a handful of silver in a Polish forest is a reminder that globalisation’s first age did not need banks, brokers or even a common tongue—only people willing to carry value a very long way.