ancient bronze coin greek troy found berlin
© Petri Berlin / Christof HannemannThis ancient Greek coin is now on view in Berlin.
Minted in Troy in the third century B.C.E., the object might have been buried as a gift to the dead. Archaeologists don't know exactly how it ended up in modern-day Germany

When a 13-year-old schoolboy discovered a small coin in a field on the outskirts of Berlin, he knew that he'd stumbled onto something special. But it wasn't until scholars analyzed the object that they realized its true significance. Minted in the third century B.C.E. in the city of Troy, located in what is now western Turkey, the bronze coin is the first ancient Greek artifact ever unearthed in the German capital.

The teenager showed his find to researchers during a November 2025 visit to Petri Berlin, an interactive archaeology lab built atop the foundations of a medieval-era Latin school.

"Nobody knew exactly what it was because it was so small," Jens Henker, an archaeologist with the Berlin Heritage Authority, tells Smithsonian magazine. "That it was something old was clear."

A numismatist identified the find as a Trojan coin dated to between roughly 281 and 261 B.C.E. Per a statement, its obverse depicts Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, in a Corinthian helmet, while its reverse features an image of the deity in a kalathos headdress, with a spear in her right hand and a spindle in the other.

Initially, the experts were unsure whether the coin had been lost by a modern-day collector in Spandau, a neighborhood in western Berlin, or deposited in the ground closer to the time of its creation. But Henker soon realized that the field where the boy had found the coin was a well-known archaeological site.

Excavations in the 1950s and '70s suggested that the area was used as a burial ground, perhaps beginning in the early Iron Age (roughly 800 to 450 B.C.E.) and continuing for centuries. Artifacts uncovered at the site include ceramic fragments, a bronze button and a Slavic knife sheath fitting.

ancient bronze coin greek troy found berlin
© Petri Berlin / Christof HannemannThe bronze coin measures 12 millimeters in diameter. Comparatively, an American dime measures 17.91 millimeters in diameter.
At 12 millimeters in diameter, the newly discovered coin is significantly smaller than an American dime. Henker suggests that given its size, the coin held little value for the Germanic-speaking peoples who lived in the region at the time. With no system of currency, these tribes viewed coins from outside groups mainly as a source of silver, gold and other precious metals.

Ancient coins that weren't melted down for reuse have typically been found in burial grounds, suggesting they were "put in graves as a kind of grave gift," Henker tells Deutsche Welle's Sarah Hucal. "This appears to be like a souvenir used to remember something — perhaps even an experience in one's life."

Exactly how the coin traveled from Troy to Berlin remains unclear. While the bronze token is the first of its kind unearthed in the city, Henker says that ancient Greek coins have previously been found elsewhere in Germany. Archaeologists in Greece, meanwhile, have also discovered objects imported from this part of Europe — including amber used to craft jewelry and other goods — in millennia-old graves.
front back ancient bronze coin greek troy found berlin
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte / Ulrike ScheibeThis bronze coin features Athena's head on its obverse and an image of the goddess with a spear in her right hand and a spindle in her left hand on the reverse
Germanic tribes left behind no written records. But a book published around 320 B.C.E. by the Greek navigator Pytheas offers additional evidence of interactions between these groups and the ancient Greek world. Although the original text is lost, reconstructions based on histories written centuries after the fact indicate that Pytheas documented his travels to the British Isles and Europe's Atlantic coast. The Greeks "were aware, of course, that Europeans faced the ocean, an embracing ocean that many believed encircled the known world," archaeologist Barry W. Cunliffe wrote in The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. "They also knew that from somewhere along this mysterious interface came tin, amber and gold."

Pytheas, however, was the first Greek person to travel beyond the "known world" and record what he saw. His findings challenged the image of these regions' inhabitants as "barbarians," so the Greeks "dismissed him a little bit at this time," Henker tells Smithsonian. "They said, 'He's spinning this. There's no way that it exists.'"

For now, Henker and his colleagues can only speculate on how the coin's journey unfolded. Trade is one possible explanation, but Henker also suggests that the ancient Greeks could have recruited Germanic peoples as soldiers, much as the Romans would a few centuries later.

"We have time periods, especially in the Iron Age, [where] we have a population loss, and we don't know where the people [went]," Henker says. "Suddenly they disappear. Maybe they were going down to the Greeks, joining the military forces there." Still, he cautions, "That's not even a hypothesis. It's an idea only."