17th-Century Coin Unearthed at a Castle in Slovakia

PRIEVIDZA, SLOVAKIA—According to a report in The Slovak Spectator, a seventeenth-century coin, pottery, and a knife were uncovered in the area where the gates once stood at Sivý Kameň, a castle on the Nitra River in west-central Slovakia. Archaeologist Dominika Andreánska said that the castle was built in the fourteenth century, but by the late seventeenth century was being used as a prison. Her team, she added, identified the gate area from old photographs of the castle ruins. The coin, a denarius, was minted in 1679 in central Slovakia during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. “It is interesting that it [the coin] dates from the end of the seventeenth century, when Sivý Kameň castle functioned only as an occasional prison, or was a ruin, because it was burnt down during the anti-Habsburg uprisings,” Andreánska concluded. To read about a basilica unearthed in Germany that was commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great, go to "Otto's Church."