Æ12

Kardia, the dominant city of the Thracian Chersonese, occupied a strategically critical position at the neck of the peninsula controlling overland access to the strait. The city's independent bronze coinage is rare precisely because its autonomy was repeatedly contested — by Athens, by Philip II, and ultimately by Lysimachus, who razed Kardia around 309 BC and refounded the population at his new city of Lysimacheia nearby. That destruction date effectively closes the issue window and accounts for the type's scarcity in the archaeological record.