he The US dollar is the most widely used currency in the world. It is the world’s main legal tender and the unofficial gold standard.
According to the Federal Reserve, 58% of the world’s financial reserves are in US dollars, more than twice the total foreign reserves of the euro, yen and renminbi combined.
31 countries have adopted it as their official currency or named their currency in its honor.; 65 countries peg the value of their currencies to the dollar. It is currently accepted in remote places such as North Korea, Siberia and research stations in the Arctic.
However, one place where dollars are not accepted is the small Czech town of Jachymov, which is ironic, because there it was, In the forests of the Crosne Hory Mountains in Bohemia, where the dollar originated more than 500 years ago, in 1520.
While at the 16th-century Jachymov Royal Mint Museum, the same place where the dollar’s first predecessors were minted, I pulled out a $1 bill bearing George Washington’s name in my wallet, and guide Jan Frankovich smiled and stopped me. “I haven’t seen one of these things in a long time,” he said, and called two of his colleagues. “At Jachymov, we only accept crowns or euros or the occasional Russian ruble. You’re the first American to come here in more than three years.”
Welcome to Yachimov: Quiet town with a population of 2,300 near the Czech-German borderthe birthplace of the dollar, and at the same time, a place where there are no dollars.
Maybe they’ve never heard of it. Maybe they didn’t know that It is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And they may never have realized that the currency that moves the world originated with them This is a one-street cityWhich is still recovering from the collapse of communism and which It has more brothels than banks.
In fact, it is possible to spend an entire day walking along Jachymov’s main street, past its abandoned Gothic and Renaissance buildings tumbling down the hill, around the cluster of luxury resorts at the foot of the valley and up to its 16th-century castle, without realizing that it was the birthplace of the dollar.
“How did you know? There’s no sign announcing it; most people who live here don’t even know!” exclaimed Michal Urban, director of the non-profit organization for the development of the Crosne Hory – Erzgebirge Mountain Region.
He said this as he guided me down a dark staircase into the vaulted basement of the Mint, where the coins were graded. “No other mining town in the world has had as much influence as Jachymov, but we have forgotten our history.”
Long before Jachymov existed, the undulating mountains that separate modern Bohemia from Saxony were dominated by the wolves and bears that roamed their virgin forests. When large quantities of silver were discovered in 1516, an enterprising local nobleman, Count Hieronymus Schlick, named the area Joachimsthal (Joachim’s Valley) in honor of Jesus’ grandfather, the patron saint of miners in the area.
“At that time, Europe was a continent of city-states with local rulers fighting for power,” local historian Jaroslav Ošek explained. He added: “Since they do not have a unified monetary unit, One of the most effective ways for rulers to assert their control was to mint their own currency, and this is what Schlick did.“.
On January 9, 1520, the Bohemian Assembly officially granted Schlick permission to mint his own silver coins.
The Count stamped Joachim’s portrait on the obverse, and the Bohemian lion on the reverse, and christened his new coin “Joachimsthalers”, which were soon shortened to “thaler”.
At a time when the metal content of coins was the sole determinant of their value, Schlick made two wise decisions to ensure the spread and survival of thalers.
First, it gave it the same weight and diameter as the Goldingroschen coin (29.2 grams) that circulated throughout most of Central Europe, making it easier to accept by neighboring kingdoms. Most importantly, he minted more coins than the world had ever seen before.
In just ten years, Joachimsthal has transformed from a village with a population of 1,050 into the largest mining center in Europe: A bustling center with 18,000 people, 1,000 silver mines and 8,000 miners.
In 1533, Joachimstal was the second largest city in Bohemia after PragueIn the mid-16th century, Urban estimated that about 12 million thalers minted in these mountains had spread throughout Europe, far more than any other currency on the continent.
The Joachimsthal silver deposits were soon exhausted, but by 1566, the thaler had become so well known throughout Europe that when the Holy Roman Empire wanted to set a standard size and silver content for many of the local coins in its kingdom, it chose the thaler, naming all accepted silver coins “Reichsthalers” (imperial thalers).
“Over the next 300 years, many countries around the world modeled their currency on the thaler.“Thaler soon began to lead a life of his own away from here,” Urban said, looking at the rusty metal roofs of Jachymov, the imposing white shaft of the oldest continuously operating mine in Europe, and Schleck Castle, which still stands majestically above the city.
As rulers across Europe began reshaping their coins into the shape of the thaler, they also renamed them in their own languages.
In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Thaler became known as “Dahler”.. In Iceland, as “dalur”. Italy had a “talero”, which should not be confused with “talar” (Poland), “talero” (Greece) or “thaler” (Hungary).
In France, it was a “jucandille,” and “it was not long before some 1,500 imitations were circulating among the small, densely populated states of the Holy Roman Empire,” Jason Goodwin wrote in his book The American Dollar: The Mighty Dollar and the Invention of America.
Thaler quickly spread to Africa, where it was used in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania. Until the 1940s, and in most parts of the Arabian Peninsula and India, where it continued to be traded during the twentieth century.
The official currency in Slovenia was the thaler until 2007.. In Samoa, the currency is still called the thaler. The coins of Romania (Leu), Bulgaria (Leu) and Moldova (Leu) take their names from the lion that was minted on the first thaler 500 years ago.
but It was the Dutch thaler (“lion dollar” or “daler” for short, pronounced almost the same as “dollar” in English) that gave its name to the American currency.. After arriving in New Amsterdam in the 17th century with Dutch settlers, dalers quickly spread throughout the Thirteen Colonies and English-speaking settlers began naming them, as well as all silver coins of similar weight, including the Spanish eight-reale “dollars.”
The dollar became the official currency of the United States in 1792. (The same year the first cent was minted) Since then, the dollar, inspired by the thaler, has continued its expansion around the world, reaching places like Australia, Namibia, Singapore, and Fiji.
However, when Orban and Ocek guided me outside the mint, past a wire fence surrounding a military watchtower on a nearby hill, I discovered that the Jachymov Mines also had a darker history.
When the city’s bright silver deposits were exhausted, Miners began to find a mysterious black substance Like the night that caused a disturbing incident Fatal lung diseases.
They called this mineral “pechblende” (“pech” means “bad luck” in German).
In 1898, while exploring the city’s mines, Physicist Marie Curie He discovered that the same metal that produced the first dollars contained two radioactive elements: Radium and polonium. This discovery disfigured her hands, made her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and ultimately caused her death.
But it also laid the groundwork for an unexpected second act: the same mines that minted the world’s currency would now fuel the nuclear arms race. Over the following decades, the city’s reopened silver mines became the world’s main source of radium.
The Nazis experimented with a nuclear reactor at this site. Written by the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, c. Robert Oppenheimer, his thesis on the Joachimsthal uranium deposit.
After World War II, Czechoslovakia retook Joachimsthal from Germany, renamed it Jáchymov and expelled the German-speaking population who had lived there for centuries alongside Czech settlers.
The government signed a secret treaty with Stalin that turned the city into a Russian labor camp.
“This marked the beginning of a fateful period in our history,” Orban said as he walked through the forest along the 8.5-kilometre trail known as Jachymov’s Hell, which traces the valley’s history, from its beginnings as a silver mining center to its transformation into a Soviet concentration camp.
“Before the war, the people of this area were very proud of their dollar production. But with demographic change, this memory was lost, and the mines were exploited to help Russia make the atomic bomb.
After Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb ended World War II, about 50,000 Soviet political prisoners were sent to Jachymov between 1949 and 1964 to extract, crush and load uranium, the fuel for the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal.
In fact, it could be said so Two of the most powerful symbols of power in the modern world – the dollar and nuclear weapons – trace their origins to this picturesque mining town. From the Bohemian Hills.
Today, Yachimov still struggles with his troubled past. Evergreen trees have begun to swallow up the massive accumulations of waste that once marred the valley. Rows of 19th-century boarded-up houses built with toxic levels of uranium waste are slowly being restored.
Yachimov’s last working mine, Svornost, which supplied the silver for the first dollars, is now pumping radioactive water into three exotic luxury resorts advertising “Radon water treatment”.
There is still no indication that Yachimov is claiming a legitimate right to be the birthplace of the dollar. But if you visit the Royal Mint Museum and ask the guides, they will proudly point behind the counter and show you a small frame with a brand-new George Washington coin.
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