After more than 230 years, the United States (US) recently stopped minting pennies. But long before that, the first dollar was minted, and it was in a one-street town far from the US.
The US dollar is the most widely used currency in the world.
It is also the primary de facto global means of payment and the unofficial world "gold standard".
According to the US Federal Reserve, 58 percent of the world's financial reserves are held in US dollars, which is more than double the combined foreign reserves in euros, yen and yuan.
The dollar has been adopted by 31 countries as their official currency or has named its currency after it, 65 countries peg the value of their national currency to the dollar, and today the dollar is accepted in remote places such as North Korea, Siberia, and research stations at the North Pole.
However, one place where dollars are not accepted is the Czech town of Jáchymov.
This is quite ironic, because it was in this small town, hidden deep in the forested landscape of the Ore Mountains mountain range in the Czech Republic (Bohemia), that the dollar was created more than 500 years ago, back in 1520.
But when I took out a one-dollar bill with the image of George Washington at the 16th-century Royal Mint Museum in Jáchymov, the very place where the earliest ancestors of the dollar were minted, museum guide Jan Francovic smiled.
"I haven't seen this in years," he said, calling over two colleagues.
"In Jáchymov we accept crowns, euros and sometimes Russian rubles."
"You are the first American to come here in the last three years."
Welcome to Jáchymov, a sleepy town near the Czech-German border with a population of 2.300, which is both the birthplace of the dollar and a place where the dollar is not accepted.
You've probably never heard of him.
You probably didn't know that it was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
And you almost certainly didn't know that the currency that rules the free world comes from this one-street town, still recovering from the collapse of communism, and with more brothels than banks.
Even if you spent a whole day walking up and down the main street of Jáchymov, past abandoned Gothic and Renaissance buildings rising on the hillside, and around the luxurious series of spas at the foot of the valley, all the way to the 16th-century castle, you would never know that this is the birthplace of the dollar.
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"And how could you?"
"There's no sign that mentions it, and even most people who live here don't know about it," Michal Urban, director of the NGO Mountain Region Krušné hory - Erzgebirge, told me, as he led me down dark stairs to the mint's basement where the quality and purity of coins were once tested.
"No mining town in the world has had as much influence as Jáchymov, but we have forgotten our own history."
Long before the creation of Jáchymov, the mountains that today separate Bohemia and Saxony were inhabited by wolves and bears that roamed the untouched forests.
When vast quantities of silver were discovered in 1516, an enterprising local nobleman, Count Hieronymus Schlick, named the area Joachimsthal (Joachim's Valley) after Saint Joachim, Jesus' grandfather and patron saint of miners.
"At that time, Europe was a continent of city-states in which local rulers fought for supremacy," explains local historian Jaroslav Oček.
"Since there was no single monetary unit, one of the most effective ways for rulers to consolidate their power was to mint their own money, and that is exactly what Schlick did."
On January 9, 1520, the then Assembly of Bohemia officially authorized Šlik to mint his silver coins.
The count embossed the image of Saint Joachim on the obverse and the Bohemian lion on the reverse, and called his new coin Joachimsthalers (Joachim's thalers), which was soon shortened to thalers.
At a time when the value of coins was measured solely by their metal content, Schlick made two wise moves to ensure the spread and survival of the thaler.
First, the thaler had the same weight and diameter as the 29,2 gram Guldengroschen (guldengroschen), which was then in use throughout much of Central Europe, making it easier for the kingdoms to adopt.
Second and more importantly, he minted more coins than the world has ever seen.
In just 10 years, Joachimsthal went from a hamlet with 1.050 inhabitants to the largest mining center in Europe.
It became a bustling city with 18.000 residents and 8,000 miners working in 1.000 silver mines.
By 1533, Joachimsthal had become the second largest city in Bohemia, after Prague.
Urban estimates that by the mid-16th century, about 12 million thalers minted from silver from these mountains had spread across Europe, more than any other currency on the continent.
Joachimstal's silver reserves were quickly depleted, but by 1566 the thaler was so well known throughout Europe that when the Holy Roman Empire wanted to standardize the size and silver content of many local currencies, it chose the thaler and called all acceptable silver coins Reichsthalers (imperial thalers).
“Over the next 300 years, many countries around the world modeled their currencies on the thaler,” says Urban, looking over the rusty roofs of Jáchymov towards the huge shaft of the oldest continuously active mine in Europe and Schlick Castle, which still dominate the town today.
"Soon the thaler began to live a life of its own far from here."
As European rulers began to reshape their coins after the thaler, they simultaneously renamed them in their own languages.
In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the thaler became known as valleys.
In Iceland it was called came out.
In Italy it was called a tallero, which should not be confused with speaks (Poland), thaler (Greece) or thaler (Hungary).
In France it was called jocandale.
"Soon some 1.500 imitations were in circulation among the small, tight-knit states of the Holy Roman Empire," writes English author and historian 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 until the 1940s, as well as throughout much of the Arabian Peninsula and in India, where it remained in circulation well into the 20th century.
The official currency of Slovenia was the tolar until 2007.
Money in Samoa is still called tālā.
And the currencies in Romania (leu), Bulgaria (lev), and Moldova (leu) are named after the lion stamped on the first thaler 500 years ago.
But it was the Dutch leeuwendaaler (lion's dollar, or daler for short - pronounced almost identically to the English dollar) that gave its name to the American currency.
After Dutch colonists brought the daler to New Amsterdam in the 17th century, the currency spread rapidly throughout the 13 colonies, and English-speaking settlers began to call it the dollar, as well as all silver coins of similar weight, including the widespread Spanish real de a ocho.
The dollar became the official currency of the United States in 1792 (the same year the first American penny was minted), and since then the descendant of the thaler has continued its journey around the world – all the way to Australia, Namibia, Singapore, and Fiji.
However, as Urban and Oček led me from the mint past the barbed wire surrounding the military observation post on a nearby hill, I learned that there was a dark side to the Jahimovo mine.
As the deposits of shiny silver dwindled, miners began to encounter a strange, black, tarry substance that was causing frighteningly high rates of fatal lung diseases.
This uranium-rich mineral was called Pitchblende (pech - in German means bad luck, misfortune).
While exploring the mines around Jáchymov in 1898, physicist Marie Curie discovered that the same ore from which the first dollars were minted contained two new radioactive elements: radium and polonium.
The discovery disfigured her hands, made her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but ultimately killed her.
But it also paved the way for an unexpected new role for this town - the same mines that forged the future world currency have now launched a nuclear arms race.
Over the next few decades, the silver mines that were reopened in the town became the largest source of radium in the world.
The Nazis conducted experiments with a nuclear reactor there.
"Father of the atomic bomb" Robert Oppenheimer wrote a thesis on the uranium-rich shafts at Joachimsthal.
And after Czechoslovakia took Joachimsthal back from Germany after World War II, it renamed it Jáchymov and expelled the German population that had lived there for centuries with Czech settlers.
The government signed a secret agreement with Joseph Stalin and turned the town into a Soviet gulag.
“It was the beginning of a very dark period in our history,” Urban told me as we walked along an 8,5-kilometer forest trail called Jahimova Hell, which traces the development of the valley from a mining center to a Soviet concentration camp.
"Before the war, the people who lived here were very proud of having created the dollar."
"But when the population changed, that memory was lost, and the mines began to be exploited to help Russia build an atomic bomb."
After Oppenheimer's atomic bomb virtually ended World War II, around 50.000 Soviet political prisoners were sent to Jáchymov between 1949 and 1964 to mine, grind and load uranium for Soviet nuclear weapons.
In fact, arguably the two most powerful symbols of power in the modern world - the dollar and nuclear weapons - originate from this quaint mining town in the hills of the Czech Republic.
The consequences of the turbulent past are still visible in Jáchymov.
The huge piles of waste rock that once marred the appearance of the valley are slowly being covered by evergreen trees.
Rows of abandoned 19th-century houses, built with materials contaminated with uranium, are now gradually being restored to their former glory.
And from the last active mine in the city, Svornost, which once mined silver for the first thalers, radioactive water is now brought to three luxury spas that offer "radon-rich water therapy."
There is still no sign in Jáchymov that the town is the cradle of the dollar.
But if you enter the Royal Mint Museum and ask the museum guides, they will proudly show you a framed banknote with the image of George Washington.
This text was originally published in 2020 and has now been updated with new information.
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