Hoards of Small Copper Shillings Found at Rokitno

Two vessels full of coins, ploughed up in the same field near Lubartów thirty years apart: more than 13,700 copper shillings of King John Casimir in all. The display belongs to the series with which the National Museum in Lublin, in its 120th year, thanks the people who built its collections - here, two generations of one farming family. The museum publishes no English text on the jubilee displays, so the quotation below is our translation of its Polish description.

National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

Two hoards of copper shillings of John Casimir (1648-1668) were discovered in 1981 and 2011 at Rokitno, in one cultivated field near the river Wieprz. They number 3,530 and 10,218 coins respectively. The first was hidden in the 1680s, the second around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries (after 1695). Burying these coins was most probably connected with the customs house that operated at Rokitno at the time. The hoards came to the Museum thanks to the public-spirited attitude of the finders, Stanisław and Adam Szczepanik.

What to expect

This is not a show in its own room. The coins are in the hall outside the permanent gallery “Coins and Medals on Polish Lands from the 10th to the 20th Century”, on the route through the permanent exhibitions. The museum does not say how many coins are on view, or whether the vessels they were buried in are shown too. Its numismatic collection page (Polish) has a photograph of one of those vessels, before and after it was glued back together.

The story of both finds is told by the museum’s numismatist Tomasz Markiewicz in the Polish journal “Wiadomości Numizmatyczne” (2020, issue 208). In April 1981 the landowner, Stanisław Szczepanik, turned up the first hoard while working the field and told the museum at once. The coins weighed 4.7 kg, and he handed them over with the shards of the pot and scraps of the leather that had sealed it.

The second hoard surfaced under the plough in autumn 2011, a dozen or so metres away. Stanisław’s grandson, Adam Szczepanik, carried the coins into the museum in a bucket on 14 November 2011: 12.48 kg of them. A metal-detector search of the field later added 201 more.

The oddities are the best part. Of the 10,218 coins in the second hoard, only nine are not John Casimir shillings, among them a Scottish copper of Charles I and a Bohemian three-kreuzer piece of Emperor Leopold I dated 1695. That one coin is what dates the burial to after 1695.

The second hoard has been on show before: the museum included it in its autumn 2015 exhibition “Skarby monet w zbiorach Muzeum Lubelskiego” (Polish; “Coin hoards in the collection of the Lublin Museum”), held when the institution was still called the Lublin Museum. Here the two Rokitno finds are shown side by side.

Context

In Polish the coin is nicknamed the “boratynka”, after Tito Livio Burattini, the Italian-born engineer and court servant who proposed it. The Cossack uprising and the Swedish invasion had left the Commonwealth with an empty treasury and an unpaid army, and the war with Muscovy was still being fought. Burattini’s answer was a copper coin officially worth a silver shilling, a third of a grosz, though its metal was worth far less.

According to the mint accounts compiled by Markiewicz, more than one and a half billion were struck between 1659 and 1666. Prices followed: in 1664 a gold ducat cost 195 groszy in silver but 270 in copper shillings. Troops paid in copper mutinied, and ending pay in boratynki was one of the demands of the Lubomirski rebellion of the 1660s. Polish still says something is “not worth a broken shilling”, and the phrase probably goes back to this coin.

Boratynki were still in circulation in the early 18th century. That is why a hoard buried after 1695, some thirty years after the mints shut, is still almost entirely made of them. The museum links both deposits to a customs house at the Wieprz crossing, recorded in 16th-century sources; Markiewicz himself puts this forward as a supposition, not a certainty.

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket. The museum’s price list does not mention the jubilee displays, and the hall leads into one of the permanent galleries, so the permanent-exhibitions ticket, 20 PLN (reduced 15 PLN), gets you in. That is our reading of the location; the museum does not say it in so many words. The combined ticket for the permanent exhibitions, the chapel and the tower costs 40 PLN (reduced 30 PLN) and is sold only at the museum’s ticket desk.

Hours follow the permanent exhibitions, and winter hours apply for the whole run: Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-17:00, Friday and Saturday 9:00-18:00. The permanent exhibitions are closed on Mondays. Free-admission days do not fall on a fixed weekday: the museum announces them month by month on its visitor-information page (Polish), and they cover the permanent exhibitions but not the tower. The same page gives no hours yet for the public holidays of 1 and 11 November, so check it again before visiting on either day.

Allow 15 minutes for the display, 45 with the coin gallery. The permanent gallery beyond the hall shows two more hoards from the Lublin region: silver cross pennies hidden around 1100 and large silver coins of the thaler type buried in the early 18th century. Seen after Rokitno, they make the point quickly: small change in copper next to real silver.

English on site: the museum’s English-language pages cover visiting information only and say nothing about English labels for the jubilee displays. Guided tours of the permanent exhibitions in English are available for groups of up to 30, at 250 PLN per group plus admission, booked at least a week ahead through edukacja@mnwl.pl .

Who it is for: coin collectors, anyone curious about 17th-century Poland, and families - a farmer and his grandson ploughing up treasure is a better story for children than a case of medals. Who can skip it: a visitor with an hour at the castle who wants the Holy Trinity Chapel and Matejko’s “Union of Lublin”.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - the museum profile: the chapel with its 1418 frescoes, the keep and nine permanent exhibitions, including the coins and medals gallery outside which this display stands.
• Tomasz Zawadzki - matter painting from the jubilee series, in the Zamek Group and Avant-garde gallery until 3 January 2027.

The full jubilee schedule is on the museum’s jubilee displays page (Polish only), and prices are on its ticket page .

Museum profile: National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) .