Luźne znaleziska monet i liczmana z rejonu byłej karczmy w miejscowości Siemichów (pow. średzki)

The article discusses six coins and a reckoning counter discovered near the remains of the ruined inn at Siemichów (distr. Środa Śląska). The inn was destroyed in 1945. The numismatic series, recovered within a radius of not more than 10 m from the ruins of the public house, is a mixed selection of five coins and a reckoning counter. In the first part of the article the author gives a brief overview of the history of the locality and its public house. The first known reference to Siemichów is from 1795, when the locality appears under the name of Neudörfel. Analysis of archival maps helped push back the origins of the locality to at least 1736. Its name then was “Neu Kretscham”. On Wernher’s map from around 1755 it appears as “Neu Kretsche”. The root in both these names – Kretscham – is a borrowing in German from the Slav karczma, meaning an inn or a public house. There is reason to believe that the inn gave rise to the settlement. The name Siemichów given to the locality after 1945 has nothing in common with this earlier name. The coin series includes a 1696 greschel struck by the mint in Brzeg (Germ. Brieg) during the reign of Emperor Leopold I (1658-1705); a coin with a face value of 1/48 thaler struck in Berlin in 1772, in the reign of Frederick II (1740-1786); a coin with a face value of 1/24 thaler struck during the reign of the same ruler in 1782 in Berlin. There were also two tokens. One of them lacks closer marks of its issuer; its period of issue was determined basing on its stylistic details as around 1920. The other token, with a face value of 5 pfennings, was issued by the authorities of the Lower Silesian town Sagan in 1917. At the same time, by far the most interesting in the series is a reckoning counter produced in the workshop of Johann Jacob Dietzel, tradesman active in Nurnberg in the period 1711-1748. In conclusion, basing on the series of stray coin finds from Siemichów the author proposes to push back the dating of the origin of this locality to a period earlier than the one known from the cartographic, not to mention the written, sources.