Over 500-year-old coin sold at auction in Copenhagen – and the buyer really had to open their wallet to take home the gold coin.
The bidding ended at 1.2 million euros, equivalent to 13.6 million kronor. The buyer was an anonymous Danish man. The coin, dated 1496, is said to be the oldest dated from Scandinavia.
The coin is the first of a total of 20,000 in a collection that will be sold. They all belonged to a businessman who died in 1923 and wrote in his will that the collection could not be sold for 100 years.
The National Museum of Denmark, which has stored part of the collection, has pre-emption rights to some coins and has bought seven of them, but not the current one.
On Saturday, 286 coins were sold for a total of 14.8 million euros. The entire collection is expected to take five years to sell and is estimated to bring in half a billion Danish kronor.
