SLOVAKIA REPUBLIC 200 korun 1997

Description

Banska Stiavnica is a town in the middle of a volcanic caldera. Historically it was a silver mining town. Wikipedia describes it as “a completely preserved medieval town.” It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.

Slovakia is in Eastern Europe. The Slovaks speak a language that is very close to Czech. There was a religious split during the Reformation that resulted in more Protestants in Czechia and more Catholics in Slovakia. The two regions were lumped together as Czechoslovakia for much of the twentieth century, though the Nazis split them into two protectorates during World War II. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 they found that they seemed to have more differences that similarities, and have gone their separate ways.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes, stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.