Rare Ukrainian Coins: Which Small Change Is Worth Money
Ukraine has plenty of coins most of us have never held or even seen: commemorative, gold, silver and others.
This post is not about them, though. It is about ordinary small change, the coins that pass through our hands every day. Some years among them are rare too, and collectors pay anywhere from $10 to $1,000 per coin for them.
Table of rare and valuable Ukrainian coins (everyday change)
I was tidying up the other day, remembered these simple yet valuable coins and decided to go through my piggy bank :-)
And guess what? I sorted through all the “gold” ones (10, 25 and 50 kopiyok and the 1-hryvnia coins), and found nothing rare!
I don’t exactly have a pile of metal, of course, but I was hoping to find something.
Which coins are the most valuable
In the table, the most valuable Ukrainian coins are marked with red cells:
- 1 kopiyka, 1994;
- 2 kopiyky, 1992;
- 2 kopiyky, 2003;
- 5 kopiyok, 1994;
- 25 kopiyok, 1995;
- 25 kopiyok, 2003;
- 50 kopiyok, 2003;
- 1 hryvnia, 1992.
The prices in the table are in US dollars and only approximate: a coin’s value depends on many things, such as its condition, your selling skills, how quickly you need to sell and so on.
There aren’t many rare years, so it’s worth glancing at the change you get. You might get lucky. Think of it as a free lottery :-)
P.S. I’ve heard that some 25-kopiyok coins from 1992 have an unusual thickening, and one of them sold at auction for 600 UAH (about $29). I looked through about twenty of mine, and they all looked roughly the same. Plenty of them are sold cheaply online too, so I tossed them back into the pile.
Where to see rare coins: the NBU Money Museum
If you’d like to look at coins, not just hunt for them in a piggy bank, the National Bank of Ukraine has its own Money Museum. It opened to visitors in Kyiv in March 2004.
The exhibition tells the story of money on Ukrainian lands from ancient times to the present day: primitive forms of money, ancient and medieval coins, money of the Russian Empire, banknotes of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Soviet money and the money of independent Ukraine.
You can visit the museum in person: tours are free and booked in advance for groups. Check the museum’s website for booking details and opening days before you go.
If you want to see everything at once, there is a virtual 3D tour in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English. You can walk around the hall, approach the display cases, zoom in on coins and banknotes, read about their material, weight and year of issue, and even rotate some of them. It’s actually handier than a real visit, because some coins are tiny and hard to make out behind glass.
To photograph the exhibits, special holders had to be made: some coins are fragile, the first hryvnias of Kyivan Rus have a shifted centre of gravity, and money from the early centuries AD has brittle edges.
Virtual tour of the NBU Money Museum