Messages on Metal: Alpha Bank coins from Philip II to Caterina Cornaro on show in Nicosia

A selection from the numismatic collection of Alpha Bank is on display in Cyprus for the first time, according to its organisers. The exhibition, Messages on Metal, opened to the public at the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia on 16 October 2026, the day after its inauguration, and runs until 10 January 2027.

The governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, Dr Christodoulos Patsalides, opened the show on the evening of Thursday 15 October. "For Cyprus, numismatic history is an inseparable part of its identity," he said in his speech.

Three collections, 136 coins

The bank lent 110 of the 136 coins, the museum's own coin collection supplies 23, and three come from the A. G. Leventis Gallery. Dr Dimitra Tsangari, who curates the Alpha Bank Numismatic Collection, was responsible for the museological study and the curation; she coordinated the project with the museum's director, Dr Tzeni Lymperopoulou Savvidou. For the museum, it is the first time part of its own coin collection has been shown as a display in its own right.

The display is arranged in three themes, which the museum calls Transactions, Narration and Symbolism. The first treats the coin as money, the other two as a historical document: the images, emblems and legends that a city or a ruler chose to put on its currency, and what they say about the economy, power and identity of the society that issued it.

Among the pieces Alpha Bank picked out when it announced the loan are a silver tetradrachm of Demetrios Poliorketes struck at Salamis, a gold stater of Philip II of Macedon marking an Olympic victory of 352 BCE, a silver tetradrachm of Eukratides from Bactria, in present-day Afghanistan, and a silver groat of Caterina Cornaro, the last queen of medieval Cyprus.

Coins as evidence for the Cypriot kingdoms

The earliest coins of the kings of Salamis are silver pieces with a recumbent ram on one face and, in the Cypriot syllabic script, the name of Evelthon, a king Herodotus places in events at the end of the 6th century BCE [1]. For the Cypro-Classical period the coins are often the main evidence for the kings themselves. The numismatist Evangeline Markou counts eighteen known kings of Paphos, ten of them identified only from the coins they struck [1].

The Demetrios tetradrachm belongs to the end of that world. Demetrios defeated Ptolemy's fleet in a sea battle off Salamis in 306 BCE, and Cyprus stayed in Antigonid hands until Ptolemy took it back in 294 BCE. Under the Ptolemies the separate coinages of the kingdoms gave way to a single currency for the island. Salamis itself lies in the area occupied by Turkey since the 1974 invasion.

By the bank's account, its collection was begun in 1972 and now holds more than 11,000 ancient coins, from Britain to India and from Ukraine to Ethiopia, alongside 2,500 coins and banknotes of the modern Greek state. Among them are early issues of Aegina, the first mint on the Greek mainland, whose coin gave the bank the emblem it adopted in 1972.

Visiting, the book and the programmes

A bilingual book with the same title, edited by Dr Tsangari, accompanies the exhibition and is sold in the museum shop. The museum plans lectures and guided tours alongside it. Its first family session is on Sunday 25 October from 10:30 to 12:00: free, in Greek, for children aged 6 to 12, with an interactive minting workshop, and booked in advance on +357 22661475 or at education@leventismuseum.org.cy. A one-hour school programme for primary and secondary pupils, also free and in Greek, is booked the same way.