1914 Austria 1-corona

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villa66
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1914 Austria 1-corona

Beitrag von villa66 » Fr 08.05.15 03:26

Austria’s 1-corona of 1914, struck in 5.00g of .835 silver, 23mm in diameter, and produced in massive numbers. At 37,897,000 pieces, it’s the second largest mintage of the Empire’s 1-corona/korona series, exceeded only by the early (1893) coinage that helped introduce the new denomination as a part of the 1892 currency reform placing Austria-Hungary on a gold standard.

This 1914 corona (note the absence of anything but the simple digit “1,” a common-sense move in a polyglot polity like Austria-Hungary) was coined in Wien when that city was the capital of an Empire with something like 50,000,000 subjects, 16 battleships, and a merchant marine of 1,000,000 tons. This 1914 corona exchanged for about 20 American cents.

Not too many years later, Wien was the capital of a Republic with about 6,000,000 citizens—and being now a small land-locked state—had no bases for battleships, or ports for merchant ships. This 1-corona exchanged at 700 to the American cent.

But these are only numbers, and stark as they are, they don’t begin to explain either 1914, or this coin. It was coined at the epicenter of the shock that would jolt millions of men, women and children out of their relatively safe and happy lives into…something else, and not better.

So the nearly untouched attractiveness of this 1914 corona—the mostly original surfaces that ordinarily are a pure pleasure for a collector—seem to me like little more, really, than debris left behind by an avalanche of human hurt, and endings.

v.
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