A schoolboy’s tiny find in a field outside Berlin has turned out to be something no one in the city had seen before.

The bronze coin, found by a 13-year-old on the outskirts of Berlin, was minted in Troy in the third century B.C.E. and is the first ancient Greek artifact ever unearthed in the German capital.

The teenager showed the object to researchers during a November 2025 visit to Petri Berlin, an interactive archaeology lab built atop the foundations of a medieval-era Latin school.

“Nobody knew exactly what it was because it was so small,” Jens Henker, an archaeologist with the Berlin Heritage Authority, told Smithsonian magazine. “That it was something old was clear.”

A numismatist identified it as a Trojan coin dated to between roughly 281 and 261 B.C.E.

According to a statement, the coin’s obverse shows Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, wearing a Corinthian helmet. The reverse shows the deity in a kalathos headdress, with a spear in her right hand and a spindle in the other.

At 12 millimetres in diameter, the coin is significantly smaller than an American dime.

Researchers first considered two possibilities: that the coin had been lost by a modern collector in Spandau, in western Berlin, or that it had been placed in the ground much closer to the time it was made.

Henker then connected the find to the field’s history as a known archaeological site. Excavations in the 1950s and 1970s suggested the area was used as a burial ground, possibly starting in the early Iron Age, roughly 800 to 450 B.C.E., and continuing for centuries.

Other objects found there include ceramic fragments, a bronze button and a Slavic knife sheath fitting.

Henker said the coin’s small size meant it likely held little value for the Germanic-speaking peoples living in the region at the time. With no currency system, those groups largely treated foreign coins as raw material for silver, gold and other precious metals.

Ancient coins that survived instead of being melted down have usually been found in burial grounds, suggesting they were “put in graves as a kind of grave gift,” Henker told Deutsche Welle’s Sarah Hucal.

“This appears to be like a souvenir used to remember something, perhaps even an experience in one’s life.”

How the coin got from Troy to Berlin is still unknown.

Henker said ancient Greek coins have been found elsewhere in Germany, while archaeologists in Greece have also found objects imported from this part of Europe, including amber used for jewellery and other goods, in ancient graves.

Germanic tribes left no written records, but a book published around 320 B.C.E. by the Greek navigator Pytheas points to contact between these groups and the ancient Greek sphere.

The original text is lost, but later reconstructions indicate Pytheas recorded travels to the British Isles and Europe’s Atlantic coast

The Greeks “were aware, of course, that Europeans faced the ocean, an embracing ocean that many believed encircled the known world,” archaeologist Barry W. Cunliffe wrote in The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek. “They also knew that from somewhere along this mysterious interface came tin, amber and gold.”

Henker told Smithsonian that Pytheas was the first Greek person to go beyond the “known world” and write about it. His account challenged Greek ideas about the people living there.

“They said, ‘He’s spinning this. There’s no way that it exists.’”

Henker said trade is one possible explanation for the coin’s path north. He also raised the possibility that ancient Greeks may have recruited Germanic people as soldiers, as the Romans later did.

“We have time periods, especially in the Iron Age, [where] we have a population loss, and we don’t know where the people [went],” Henker said. “Suddenly they disappear. Maybe they were going down to the Greeks, joining the military forces there.”

Still, he cautioned, “That’s not even a hypothesis. It’s an idea only.”

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