1 Shilling Fieseler Fi 156 Storch

Somalia's shilling coinage has been issued by rotating private minting contractors since the early 2000s, largely because the federal government has exercised minimal control over currency production. This piece belongs to a long run of themed stainless steel issues — many struck by the Bavarian company Mayer & Grampp — that circulate more in collector markets than in Mogadishu.

The Fi 156 Storch was the Luftwaffe's primary liaison and reconnaissance aircraft, famously used in 1943 to extract Mussolini from the Gran Sasso mountaintop hotel where Italian partisans held him — landing on a patch of ground roughly the length of a tennis court.