A friend just sent me seven coins she brought home from a trip to Hong Kong, which I was glad to get and add to my little collection of oddball coins.
The problem was, I couldn't identify five of them. There are handy, helpful sites all over the Internet that I use to identify coins, but I couldn't even figure out what denomination these were. After broadening my search, I discovered they were not from Hong Kong at all but from Japan.
I love researching foreign coins, but sometimes I find one that stumps me. A few years ago someone gave me a coin she said was from Greece. I looked up Greek coins and couldn't find one like it, then on closer examination I decided the writing on it was not Greek at all but Cyrillic.
With that determined, I started looking at Russian coins, but that got me nowhere too. Finally, I got the bright idea to transliterate the words on the coin. I found a chart online that showed the Cyrillic alphabet with the Roman equivalent for each letter.
On the reverse of the coin was "20" and then the word СТОТИНКИ. Just taking each equivalent letter, this came out to be STOTINKI. I thought to myself, this can't be right -- nobody has money called stotinki.
Well, you know what? Bulgaria does. Their unit of currency is the lev, divided into 100 stotinki, which is actually plural -- one is a stotinka.
In American dollars, 20 stotinki is about 14 cents. Oh, well. Its real value is that it is my first and only coin from Bulgaria.
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