Archaeologists working at Naryn-Kala Citadel in Dagestan uncovered an ultra-rare 13th-century Avar coin linked to Bayar, son of Suraka. The find came during the third season of excavation inside Derbent’s UNESCO World Heritage complex and adds a securely excavated example to a very small body of medieval Avar coinage.
Vladimir Koval, the expedition director at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: "fewer than ten examples of Bayar’s coins are currently known". That count makes the new specimen one of the clearest physical references yet to Bayar, a ruler of the medieval Avar polity centered in the highlands of present-day Dagestan.
Naryn-Kala Citadel in Derbent
The coin matters because it was recovered in a controlled excavation at Naryn-Kala Citadel in Derbent, not from an old collection or an undocumented findspot. For researchers working on Medieval Avaria, that context helps place Bayar’s coinage inside a dated archaeological sequence on the western shore of the Caspian Sea.
The piece also sharpens the picture of how Bayar’s authority may have been expressed. The coinage combines Georgian and Arabic writing, and published numismatic research reconstructs the Arabic legend as identifying the issuer as "Malik Bayar, son of Suraka, Christian."
Bayar coinage and Khunzakh
Koval identifies Khunzakh as the likely place where Bayar’s coins were produced. That gives the new discovery a geographic anchor inside the mountainous interior of Dagestan, where the medieval Avar polity was centered and where a rare coin type could have circulated before reaching Derbent.
Earlier research on comparable specimens has interpreted these unusual issues as multiple copper denominations. That means the Naryn-Kala fragment is not just a single artifact; it is part of a broader effort to reconstruct how Bayar’s money functioned in daily exchange and how far this small coinage tradition may have spread.
Elongated coin fragment
Only part of the coin survives, and its unusual shape initially made identification difficult. The fragment found at Naryn-Kala represents only part of what would originally have been an elongated coin rather than a circular coin, which is one reason the piece stood out during excavation.
The Avar coin was not the only unusual discovery from the excavation. Archaeologists also recovered part of a large glazed ceramic dish bearing a scratched Arabic inscription beneath its glaze, and researchers interpret the surviving text as meaning that the vessel was made by a craftsman named Matan.
For readers following the excavation, the practical next step is research: each securely excavated Bayar coin can refine where the coins were produced and how they circulated. With fewer than ten examples known, this fragment adds weight to a record that remains thin but no longer rests on isolated stray finds alone.
