Mint of Poland’s pretty ‘Roman & Greek Goddess’ coin series continues with the luck granting Fortuna & Tyche

If you lived in a city in Ancient Greece and wanted it to be prosperous, you gave offering to the goddess Tyche. The daughter of Aphrodite and either Zeus or Hermes (we’re not sure as the Greek gods did more shagging than Austin Powers…), she basically got blamed for anything bad happening, like floods or droughts.

Widely admired across the Greek World, her temple in Alexandria, the Tychaeon, was said by contemporaries to be one of the finest in the Hellenistic World. She was a popular subject for coins and it’s of little surprise that she made the transition to the Roman pantheon with relative ease, this time as Fortuna. As with the Greeks, she remained the personification of luck, even surviving past the fall of Rome into the Renaissance period.

This is the fourth in a series that has always flown a little under the radar in a field full of similar, and excellent designs, but that’s unfair. A quick glance as this issue will tell you why – it’s a gorgeous coin. The three previous issues have all been frist class, but this one has a flow to it that lifts it above them, in my view at least. The gilding of the key elements looks excellent against the antique finish.

The common obverse is back again, a mildly tweaked standard effort with a pretty border surrounding the effigy of Queen Elizabeth II. The mintage of this two ounce silver coin is capped at 500 pieces, and it comes in a wooden box with a Certificate of Authenticity. The Mint of Poland recently started a companion series with the gods, starting with Mars & Ares. An underappreciated series. See the rest in our comprehensive guide to the Mennica Polska’s mythology coins.