Notae Numismaticae - Zapiski Numizmatyczne (11.2016)

THE NOR Tl I BLACK SEA COLLECTION...

The numismatic collection of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
still boasts among others two gold staters of Paerisades, which were acąuired from
T. Prowe, originally from I. Terlecki’s collection,18 and subseąuently published
by A.L. Berthier de la Gardę and A. Oreshnikov.19 Terlecki decided to keep around
1,000 of his bronze coins, which together with a certain number of left-over spec-
imens, would later become the foundation for another collection of coinage from
the North Black Sea region.20
He received his frontline assignment in 1914 and died during the performance
of his medical duties in 1916. Later on, Dr TerleckTs widów would undertake
to sell his collections of coins as well as all the other antiąuities. Initially,
to the museum of the University of Perm and the Archaeological Museum in
Odessa, but the outbreak of the October Revolution and the ensuing civil war
in Russia thwarted any possibility of selling the collection. As a result, Maria
Terlecka was forced to sell some large-sized, and unhandy, archaeological artifacts
in 1918, before her joumey to Poland, to the Kerch merchant family named
Mesaksudi,21 who would eventually go on to sell all of their collections, including
that of TerleckTs, to the Louvre in 1919, where they have been preserved to this
day.22
In August 1919, Maria Terlecka and her children boarded an evacuation train
to Poland, taking with them three chests fuli of coins. The remaining chest was
forwarded to Sevastopol by train, later by sea route to Galati, Romania, and finally
to Warsaw by land. In Poland, due to financial difficulties, she was forced to sell
the Russian silver coins by weight, while the Polish gold coins were purchased by
the Bank of Poland in 1922 and the ancient coins from the collection, by the MNW
in the years 1925 and 1930 for a total of 30,000 zlotys (Fig. 2).23 A certain number
of coins remained in the family’s possession, to be sold at a later time to Lech

in Germany in 1928. For morę information, see BOROVKOVA 1999: 95-98.
I would like to thank Mrs. Tatiana Izbash-Gotzkan for kindly allowing me to use the complete paper
she delivered at the Odessa conference as well as a number of interesting but little known details from Theodor
Prowe’s life.
18 SNG Pushkin: 1341-1342.
BERTHIER DE LA GARDĘ 1912: 104, 106; ORESHNlKOV 1912: 37, pl. 1.2. See also 1392-1393 (gold
staters of unknown rules) and 1147 (trihemiobol ANOKHIN: 181).
20 For a clearly expressed intention to recreate the collection, as stated in the correspondence between
1. Terlecki and A. Berthier de la Gardę, see IZBASH-GOTZKAN 2016: 217-218.
21 For morę about the Mesaksudi family, see BOROVKOVA 1999: 107-116.
22 Borovkova (1999: 94) relates that she received confirmation from the Louvre in 1997 that both
the collection of the Mesaksudi family and TerleckFs specimens forming part thereof are still housed
in the ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiąuities department under the inventory numbers MD 1111-1354
and SA 2251-2314. Furthermore, a part of the Mesaksudi collection can be found in the Saint-Germain-en-Laye
museum. It was published by M. Rostovtzev in 1923.
23 SZEMIOTHOWA 1955: 8-10; reprinted in: IDEM 1958: 341-343; STRZAŁKOWSKI 1991: 125
(herein: 815 and 926 coins); KRZYŻANOWSKA and BYLICKI 1975: 49; PIEŃKOWSKI 2000: 59.