Coins, Bank Notes and Medals

The Wien Museum Coin and Medal Collection encompasses some 20,000 objects. From 1863 onwards the Vienna City Archives had the task to establish a Coin and Medal Collection comprising exclusively Viennensia items and so was initially responsible for collecting historical numismatic items. When the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna was then opened in the New City Hall in 1887, a Viennensia Medal Collection of several hundred pieces could already be displayed. 

The Museum’s medals inventory is marked above all by valuable and rare pieces for the period from the 18th century onwards, when the Viennese Medal achieved outstanding artistic significance. As for current purchases and additions, the focus lies on medals from Viennese everyday life in recent decades. 

The painter Ignaz Spöttl, who died in 1892, bequeathed a gift of coins to the Museum that formed the basis of the Coin Collection. The focus of his collection was on stamped coins of the Danubian Monarchy from the reign of Emperor Maximilian I (1493-1519) up to the period around 1890. As part of the preparations for the exhibition “Vom Pfennig zum Euro. Geld aus Wien” (“From the Pfennig to the Euro. Money from Vienna”, 2002), the existing money collection was systematically extended. Besides coins ranging from the Viennese Pfennig from the Middle Ages via Gulden and Kreuzer, Kronen und Heller, Schilling and Groschen up to the Euro and the Cent, there are now also numerous examples of paper money from the 2nd half of the 18th century to the present day.