A hoard of 1,000 silver coins discovered in 2019 beneath the floor of a church in northeastern Poland is going on display at the Warmia Archdiocese Museum (MAW) in Olsztyn. The coins will be exhibited along with the glazed ceramic mug they were buried in under the northwest corner of the chancel of the church of St. Andrew the Apostle in Barczewo.

The coins date to the late 16th and early 17th centuries and include Polish silver groschens minted during the reign of King Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587-1632), shillings from Ducal Prussia when it was a Polish fiefdom and coins from Riga, Lithuania. The oldest coins are three half-groschen crowns dating to the reign of King John I Albert (r. 1492-1501) The most recent coins date to 1628.

St. Andrew was a monastery church when the hoard was buried, and it was likely the monks who buried it. Barczewo was roiled by military conflicts between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden and Brandenburg-Prussia in the late 16th and early 17th century, which may have something to do with why the coins were hidden. The monastery survived the repeated burnings and battles Barczewo suffered, but one of the side-effects of war, disease, took a ruthless toll on the monks, killing most of them.

According to researchers Paweł Milejski, and Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz, the small denomination of the coins indicate they were donated to the order over a long period of time and cached under the church floor. They were either deposited in the hiding place gradually beginning in the 1620s and began later and was collected over a shorter time frame between 1625 and 1628. No more coins were collected after 1628, perhaps because the person collecting them died. There was heavy fighting and widespread disease in Warmia as a result of the Polish–Swedish War in 1628.

According to experts, the strict rules of the Franciscan order suggest that the money was not the property of a specific monk, but rather a deposit of alms. The value of the accumulated money is approximately 815.1 groszy. This sum, they estimate, would be enough to feed an adult male for 242–243 days.

“It is possible to hypothesize who managed the cache. It was someone who was still alive in 1628 and died no later than 1629. This reduces the list to four individuals: Teodor Popławski, guardian (1628), Ludwik Gruntowicz, preacher (1628), Benedict of Prague (1629), and Adrian of Kaunas, keeper (1629),” the authors of the book about the Barczewo treasure pointed out. In their opinion, “the most likely candidate remains the keeper – Adrian of Kaunas.”

The Glencoe coin hoard, linked to the brutal 1692 massacre of the Glencoe MacDonald clan and maybe even buried by one of its victims, is going on permanent display at the Glencoe Folk Museum in the Scottish Highlands near where it was found.

The hoard was discovered in 2023 during an excavation of a summerhouse in a glen near the Pass of Glencoe that was used as a hunting lodge or feasting hall by chief Alasdair Ruadh “MacIain” MacDonald of the Glencoe MacDonald clan. The coins had been placed in a pot and covered with a pebble before burial under the hearth of a grand stone fireplace.

The pot contained silver and bronze coins from the 16th and 17th centuries. Most of them were British coins, minted by Elizabeth I, James VI of Scotland/James I of Britain, Charles I, the Commonwealth, Charles II. However, it also contained a bronze coin of Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621-1665), a brass coin of Louis XIII of France (r. 1610-1643) and a rare quattrino of Pope Clement VIII (r. 1592-1605). Other objects discovered in the excavation of the hoard include: musket shot, a powder measure, spindle whorls, and high-status pottery from England, France and Germany, including a large fragment from a “beardman” jug produced in workshops on the Rhine.

None of the coins found in the hoard were minted after the 1680s, which indicates they were hidden right before or even during the massacre. Since nobody ever returned to retrieve this valuable treasure, it’s possible the person who buried it was one of the killed. Another possibility is that it was buried there by a survivor fleeing the massacre who never had the opportunity to return. The presence of English coins is expected in a Scottish hoard, but the European coins and pottery fragments suggest some of the coins may have been collected by Maclain himself who was known to have traveled widely on the continent.

Dr Eddie Stewart, senior archaeology lecturer at Glasgow University, said of the project: “The excavations at the summerhouse site, and our surveys and excavations in the wider landscape, paint a vivid picture of the world of the Macdonald of Glencoe chiefs. Instead of wild and savage clansmen in a remote glen, they were highly educated, well-travelled and better connected with access to continental educations, imported wine and tobacco, and fine dining wares from Germany, France, and England.

“The coins from the hoard highlight these connections which surely played a part in how the chiefs presented themselves and performed their status and worldliness to their clan, kin, and guests.”

The Glencoe Folk Museum is the ideal location to tell this story, as it combines the charm of authentic 1800s thatched croft cottages with a new fully accessible exhibition space and a remote engagement program that makes the museum’s collections and events available worldwide via the internet. It is currently closed for construction and will reopen early next year.

Catriona Davidson, the Curator of Glencoe Folk Museum, said: “We are so excited to be adding these artefacts to our collection. One of the aims of our current redevelopment project is to create exhibition spaces with the environmental conditions and security to allow us to acquire more significant objects – and we’re thrilled that this has already paid off.

“Items such as these give us a tangible connection to the people who lived here in the past and can tell us so much about everyday life in the Glen. We can’t wait to work with the archaeology team to interpret the artefacts for the Museum and share their stories in the place where they were discovered.”

An unique assemblage from a theatrical set designed and painted by Salvador Dalí for a 1939 ballet has been acquired by the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The auction lot included the backdrop curtain that is the largest work of art ever made by the surrealist master, plus four friezes and fours wings, for a total of 13 canvases. It is almost the complete set from the original staging, missing only the giant wooden swan which no longer survives. It sold at Bonhams Paris for €254,400 ($292,000).

In March 1939, Dalí was contracted to design the sets for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo’s production of Venusberg, a one-act ballet that used the Venusberg Bacchanale from the first act of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser as the score. It was a perfect commission for a surrealist. Dalí wrote the libretto, a Freudian flight of fantasy wherein King Ludwig II of Bavaria encounters Venus in the form of a fish-headed mermaid and then a dragon. He stabs the goddess, and she splashes him with her “libidinous poison” which drives his mad. He then hallucinates, among other things, a dancer emerging from a giant wooden swan from the Leda myth, his lover, famed courtesan Lola Montez, and the Three Graces as dressmakers’ mannequins.

Dalí was in New York at that time, so he created a scale model of the set and had it shipped to Monaco. Under Dalí’s supervision, Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo’s set designer Oreste Allegri and Prince Alexandre Schervachidze, head of the workshops, would execute his vision. The massive scenic backdrops for the mad king’s dreamscapes were laid out flat on the floor of the workshop and hand painted.

The backdrop constitutes the central and monumental element of this set imagined by Salvador Dalí. Over nine metres [30 feet] high and nearly eighteen metres [59 feet] wide, it unfolds a landscape that is at once mysterious and dreamlike, crossed by mythological, artistic and psychoanalytical references. At the centre rises majestically Mount Venus, occupying almost the entire height of the curtain. At its base, on the left, a waterfall flows into a calm pond. This presence of water, rare within this mineral and arid environment, introduces a pause in the landscape: it evokes both the source of life and the flow of time, elusive and continuous.

The symbolic mountain is pierced at its heart, revealing a tempietto and figures from the Italian Renaissance that reproduce the composition of Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin, itself inspired by the architecture of Donato Bramante. Yet here the scene seems emptied of its original meaning: there is neither union nor true celebration. Love is absent. This absence may be linked to the figure of the swan spreading its wings, once placed in front of the mountain, which referred to the myth of Leda and evoked both desire, temptation and the guilt associated with feminine sin.

To the left of the mountain, the carcass of a wrecked boat bears witness to an ancient drama that time seems gradually to erase. Nearby, a figure stands with an arm raised in an ambiguous posture: a call for help, a gesture of despair, or a final attempt at communication? To the right, in the distance, a desert stretches to the horizon line, punctuated by immense enigmatic rocks. This arid space intensifies the feeling of solitude and infinity so characteristic of Dalí’s landscapes.

The friezes and wings framed the spaces that transition from the stage to the backstage. Dalí employed a cabinet of curiosities motif, painting drawers, some open, some closed, and cubbies, some empty, some with figures including busts, skulls, ewers, his wife Gala, a reclining nude and more. The wings are an abstract, organic line design that suggests musical notes dancing in space.

In September of that year, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and the world about to plunge into war, the ballet’s name was changed from the Wagnerian Venusberg to the decidedly less German sounding Bacchanale. Dalí and Gala were in France then, and were unable to get to New York City for the premiere of the ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 9, 1939, where it was a huge hit and of course caused many pearls to be clutched.

The company would perform Bacchanale with Dalí’s set for the next two years, then for one-off productions in 1945 and the last one in 1967. When the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo disbanded in 1968, the set was donated to the Ballet Foundation in New York. They donated it to Butler University in Indianapolis where it remained from 1970 until 2018 when it was sold at Sotheby’s New York for a private collection in Spain which loaned it out for display three times in Spain and Italy.

Now that it has been acquired by the Dalí Museum, the Bacchanale backdrop and wings will have a new home where they can be exhibited surrounded by thousands of other works by Dalí. The museum is embarking on a major expansion this year. Construction begins in the fall on an addition that will add 35,000 square feet to the existing building. The timing could not be better for them to figure out an ideal space to display such a monumental testament to Dalí’s work on the stage.