Kopeck - Peter I

These wire money kopecks — struck by the ancient "fish scale" method of hammering flattened wire blanks rather than milled discs — were already an anachronism by 1698. Peter I despised them. He considered the primitive technique an embarrassment compared to Western milled coinage, and his monetary reforms of the early 1700s would abolish the method entirely. This piece dates to the last years before that forced modernization, when the old hand-hammering dies were still producing coins in a manner essentially unchanged since Ivan the Terrible.