The coin
cabinet
About the coin cabinet
The Swiss National Museum’s coin cabinets are located in the National Museum Zurich and house over 100,000 items, including coins and medals as well as banknotes, securities, credit cards and coin dies. The collection ranges from Celtic coinage to current coins and banknotes. The museum is the only institution that systematically collects coins from the whole of Switzerland. With around 30,000 pieces, the Swiss coin collection is probably the largest collection of Swiss coinage in existence. The aim and purpose of the collection is to document and research the history of Swiss coins and money, in close collaboration with art and cultural history researchers.
Online collection
At present, 15,810 of the more than 30,000 objects in the numismatic collection can be viewed online. More items are being digitalised every month.
To the online collection:
sammlung.nationalmuseum.ch
Photo: AURA Foto Film Verlag GmbH
About the more than 30,000 objects in the collection
The majority of these 30,000 objects are coins from Swiss mints – cities, dioceses, abbeys and cantons – and from the Swiss Confederation. These are supplemented by:
– coins minted by the Celts who settled in Switzerland and by the Merovingian and Frankish rulers who minted in the area that is now Switzerland;
– a representative universal collection consisting of important coin series from northern Italy, France and southern
Germany from the early modern period (16th–18th century);
– the Roman coin collection from Rheinau Abbey;
– the coins found in the Canton of Zurich;
– special collections such as the personal collection of the famous Schwyz medallist J. C. Hedlinger and the important collection of Swiss medals from Rudolf Isenschmid and Gerold Meyer von Knonau.