As rulers across Europe began remodelling their coins after the thaler, they also renamed them in their own languages. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the thaler became known as the “daler”. In Iceland, it was the “dalur”. Italy had the “tallero”, not to be confused with the “talar” (Poland), the “tàliro” (Greece) or the “tallér” (Hungary). In France, it was “jocandale”, and “before long, there were some 1,500 imitations circulating among the tiny, tightly packed statelets of the Holy Roman Empire,” writes Jason Goodwin in his book Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America.
The thaler soon spread to Africa where it was used in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania as late as the 1940s – and across much of the Arab Peninsula and into India, where it was still in circulation through the 20th Century. The official currency of Slovenia was the “tolar” until 2007. The money in Samoa is still called “tālā”. And the currencies in Romania (“leu”), Bulgaria (“lev”) and Moldovia (“leu”) today all take their names from the lion stamped on the first thaler 500 years ago.
But it was the Dutch leeuwendaler (“lion dollar”, or “daler” for short – pronounced nearly identically to the English “dollar”) that gave the US currency its name. After first arriving in New Amsterdam in the 17th Century with Dutch colonists, the dalers quickly spread throughout the Thirteen Colonies and English-speaking settlers began calling them – and all similarly weighted silver coins, including the widely used Spanish real de a ocho (“piece-of-eight”) coin – “dollars”. The dollar became the US’ official currency in 1792 (the same year the US minted its first penny) and ever since, the thaler-inspired dollar has continued its march across the globe to places like Australia, Namibia, Singapore and Fiji.
Yet, as Urban and Ochec led me out of the mint and past a barbed-wire fence holding a military lookout tower on a nearby hillside, I learned that the mines of Jáchymov also have a much darker claim to fame.
