1 Thaler    (sold for $465.0)

1780s, Kingdom of Hungary. Beautiful Silver Medallic St. George Thaler Coin. XF+

Mint Place: Kremnitz?
Mint Period: 1780s-1850s
Denomination: Medallic St. George Thaler
Medallist: after Christian Hermann Roth von Rothenfels
Condition: Edge tooling (possibly mint-made), otherwise a nicely toned XF-AU struck from beautifully engraved dies and fine style!
Weight: 25.03gm
Diameter: 44mm
Material: Silver

Obverse: St. George on warhorse killing the dragon.
Legend: S:GEORGIVS EQVITUM PATRONVS .
Translation: "St. George Patron of Knights."

Reverse: Apostles with Jesus in storm-tossed boat on Sea of Galilee.
Legend: IN TEMPESTATE SECVRITAS *
Translation: "Safety in the Tempest."

For your consideration a beautiful medallic St. George thaler / lucky coin. This specimen was probably struck during the 18th-19th century in Hungary, at the Kremnitz mint, immitating the silver thaler and gold 10 ducats masterpieces which were issued by Jeremias Roth von Rothenfels, who was die-cutter between 1690-1718. Later the the St. George thaler was re-struck under Franz Joseph for the Hungarian Millenium Anniversary, bearing the date 1896. Here we have a beautiful 18th-19th century issue in a good collectable condition. A nicely preserved specimen for this issue!

In Christian hagiography Saint George (ca. 275-281 – April 23, 303) was a soldier of the Roman Empire, from the then Greek-speaking Anatolia, now modern day Turkey, and is venerated as a Christian martyr.

Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Oriental Orthodox Churches. He is immortalised in the tale of George and the Dragon and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

St. George is the patron saint of Aragon, Canada, Catalonia, China, England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Montenegro, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, and Serbia, as well as the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Ferrara, Freiburg, Genoa, Ljubljana, and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organisations and disease sufferers.

The episode of St George and the Dragon was a legend, brought back with the Crusaders and retold with the courtly appurtenances belonging to the genre of Romance (Loomis; Whatley). The earliest known depiction of the mytheme is from early eleventh-century Cappadocia (Whately), (in the iconography of the Eastern Orthodox Church, George had been depicted as a soldier since at least the seventh century); the earliest known surviving narrative text is an eleventh-century Georgian text (Whatley).

In the fully-developed Western version, a dragon makes its nest at the spring that provides water for the city of "Silene" (perhaps modern Cyrene) in Libya or the city of Lydda, depending on the source. Consequently, the citizens have to dislodge the dragon from its nest for a time, in order to collect water. To do so, each day they offer the dragon a human sacrifice. The victim is chosen by drawing lots. One day, this happened to be the princess. The monarch begs for her life with no result. She is offered to the dragon, but there appears the saint on his travels. He faces the dragon, slays it and rescues the princess. The grateful citizens abandon their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity.

The dragon motif was first combined with the standardized Passio Georgii in Vincent of Beauvais' encyclopedic Speculum historale and then in Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, which guaranteed its popularity in the later Middle Ages as a literary and pictorial subject (Whatly).

The parallels with Perseus and Andromeda are inescapable. In the allegorical reading, the dragon embodies a suppressed pagan cult. The story has roots that predate Christianity. Examples such as Sabazios, the sky father, who was usually depicted riding on horseback, and Zeus's defeat of Typhon the Titan in Greek mythology, along with examples from Germanic and Vedic traditions, have led a number of historians, such as Loomis, to suggest that George is a Christianized version of older deities in Indo-European culture.

In the medieval romances, the lance with which St George slew the dragon was called Ascalon, named after the city of Ashkelon in Israel.

In Sweden, the princess rescued by Saint George is held to represent the kingdom of Sweden, while the dragon represents an invading army. Several sculptures of Saint George battling the dragon can be found in Stockholm, the earliest inside Storkyrkan ("The Great Church") in the Old Town.