Abonoteichos was a minor Black Sea port of little imperial consequence until the mid-2nd century, when the self-proclaimed oracle Alexander turned it into a pilgrimage site built around a manufactured snake-cult deity called Glycon. The city later renamed itself Ionopolis in Alexander's honor. This Trajanic bronze predates that episode by decades, placing it in the town's obscure pre-cult period — when it was producing civic coinage unremarkable enough that the reference corpus for this type remains thin.
Abonoteichos was a minor Black Sea port of little imperial consequence until the mid-2nd century, when the self-proclaimed oracle Alexander turned it into a pilgrimage site built around a manufactured snake-cult deity called Glycon. The city later renamed itself Ionopolis in Alexander's honor. This Trajanic bronze predates that episode by decades, placing it in the town's obscure pre-cult period — when it was producing civic coinage unremarkable enough that the reference corpus for this type remains thin.