Archaeologists working at Naryn-Kala Citadel in Derbent, Dagestan, have uncovered an ultra-rare 13th-century Avar coin linked to Bayar, son of Suraka, during the third season of a major excavation inside the fortress. The fragment is only part of an elongated coin, not the round form more familiar from later money.
The find matters because fewer than ten examples of Bayar’s coins are currently known, making each new specimen a hard piece of evidence for the medieval Avar polity in the highlands of present-day Dagestan. Vladimir Koval said fewer than ten examples of Bayar’s coins are currently known, underscoring how little survives from this issue and why a securely excavated piece from Derbent’s UNESCO World Heritage complex is being watched closely.
Bayar ruled in medieval Avaria, and Koval identifies Khunzakh as the likely place where the coins were produced. The coinage combines Georgian and Arabic writing, and published numismatic research reconstructs the Arabic legend as reading “Malik Bayar, son of Suraka, Christian.” That mix points to a ruler whose money moved across political, religious and cultural lines in the medieval Caucasus, where written traditions could be folded into the same object.
What the new discovery does not yet answer is how those coins functioned in daily life. Earlier research on comparable specimens has treated the unusual pieces as multiple copper denominations, but researchers still have not established their relationship to the more common currencies that circulated in the 13th-century Caucasus. That gap leaves the coin important for what it proves and frustrating for what it still cannot explain: its exact value, its reach, and how often an ordinary user might have handled one.
Archaeologists also recovered part of a large glazed ceramic dish with a scratched Arabic inscription beneath its glaze, which researchers read as naming a craftsman called Matan. For now, the coin from Naryn-Kala adds a rare and securely found example to a tiny corpus, and it strengthens the case that coin production in the mountainous eastern Caucasus was more varied than the surviving record suggests. The next step is closer study of the fragment and the parallel finds, because that is where the question shifts from a rare object to the system that made it useful at all.
