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Kopeck - Peter I
| Issuer | Russian Empire |
|---|---|
| Year | 1709 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Technique | Hammered (wire) |
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| Obverse description | A crowned equestrian figure of the Tsar, depicted as a mounted warrior brandishing a spear, galloping to the right in the traditional wire kopeck style. The rider is rendered in the schematic, elongated manner characteristic of early 18th-century Russian wire money. Cyrillic date characters appear beneath the horse's hooves in the lower field, recording the year in the Old Church Slavonic numerical notation. |
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| Obverse script | Log in to see details |
| Obverse lettering | ҂АΨѲ (Translation: 1709) |
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| Additional information |
Peter I's wire kopecks — the chekanka series hammered from drawn silver wire — were already anachronistic by 1709, a medieval technology persisting into an empire that had just crushed Sweden at Poltava. Peter despised them, referring to the fish-scale coins as an embarrassment to a modernizing state, and had been pushing milled coinage since the reforms of 1698. The wire kopeck continued anyway, primarily because rural and low-value commerce had no viable substitute yet.
Production ended definitively in 1718 as the milled copper kopeck absorbed everyday transactions entirely.