22 December 2023 – 9 July 2024

State Historical Museum, Moscow

Organized by

the State Historical Museum 

Participants:tr

the State Historical Museum, Moscow; State Incorporated Astrakhan History and Architecture Museum and Heritage Site, Astrakhan; State Museum and Nature Reserve "Kulikovo Field", Tula; the  "Tsarskoye Selo" State Museum and Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg; the State Hermitage, Kursk Regional Museum, the Moscow Kremlin Museums

 

The Moscow Kremlin Museums take part in the exhibition project of the State Historical Museum called "Treasure Troves. Hidden History", which tells about the old tradition of hiding, concealing from prying eyes the most precious things.

For centuries, the safest and most trusted place to hide valuables was in the ground. Folk tales tell of secretly buried barrels and chests of coins and jewellery, but it was not only gold and silver that were kept in this way. Stone Age treasures included flint arrows, tool blanks and animal figures with sacred significance.

Visitors to the exhibition will see interesting and varied buried treasures from the Neolithic period to the 20th century comprising ancient silver tableware, early Slavic jewellery, and later jewellery and coins.

The Moscow Kremlin Museums keep several dozen hoards found in the territory of the oldest part of Moscow, ranging from pre-Mongolian jewellery complexes to Russian imperial coins.

The display presents two unique treasures from the Kremlin collection, unparalleled in other museum collections. One is a hoard of ancient Roman coins dating from the 1st to the 3rd AD, discovered in the early 19th century during renovation works in the Moscow Kremlin. It is a Russian copper loving cup (bratina) of the 17th century containing 32 bronze and copper coins minted during the reign of Roman emperors from Tiberius to Constantine I. This complex is probably the first revealed domestic numismatic collection, brought from Europe in the 17th century for an unknown antiquities amateur. Famous Moscow collector P.F. Karabanov purchased the treasure from its finders; later it was transferred to the Armoury Chamber as part of his collection.

The second hoard comprises 552 Russian gold coins from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. It was discovered in 1994 by construction workers not far from the Moscow Kremlin in the cellar of a house in Znamenka Street. This trove is the largest of the Moscow treasures of imperial gold coins and at the same time the only identified hoard of the Great Patriotic War, as the coins were placed in two glass jars and wrapped in scraps of the "Pravda" newspaper of 1942.