2016-05-13 Fri

Alexandre Carathéodory Pasha was a prominent 19th Century diplomat who served the Ottomans in Berlin. There, he met a famous French diplomat and noted numismatist of those times, William-Henri Waddington. Ever since then he kept collecting coins.

Alexandre Carathéodory was a Greek, born in Constantinople and studied law in Paris. He went on to serve the Ottoman Empire as a translator, an ambassador to Rome, a commissioner in Berlin, twice as Governor-General of Crete and the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Ottoman Empire later on.

He collected about 630 coins, most of which he acquired when he was the Prince of the Island of Samos, from 1885 to 1894. The entire century old collection was bought by one of his great grandsons at an auction.

His collection mainly included Greek and Roman issues, a few Byzantine coins, and some issues from Near Eastern empires and early Islamic states. Almost all of them were base metal, billon or silver. One of it was gold - a posthumous quarter-stater of the Macedonian King Philip II and one of them was electrum, a third-stater of the Kings of Lydia, struck c.610 to 546 B.C.

The collection also consisted of coins from the Greek island of Samos where the residents might have given away their stray finds to the local Pasha.

Samos coins were mostly struck by the Greek from 6th to the 2nd Centuries B.C. Romans also minted many of them from 1st to the 3rd Centuries A.D. The Roman issues are rare and Alexandre’s collection had many of these coins.

Apart from these, the collection consisted of several other ancient coins as well.