[Rockhounds] Five hundred years after coining the first dollar, a tiny mining town is coming to grips with the many ways it shaped the modern world.

[Doug Bank]

There is quite a lot written about this place, also known as St Joachimsthal, in Tom Zoellner’s book “Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World”. The Soviets took over the town in 1945 and essentially turned it into a slave labor camp for the mining of uranium. On a good day, they mined almost 270 tons of good pitchblende a day. It is likely that all the early Soviet nuclear bombs were created using uranium from the mines in this area.

> On Jan 12, 2020, at 7:27 AM, Kreigh Tomaszewski <kreigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The US dollar is the most widely used currency in the world. It is both the
> primary de facto global tender and the world’s unofficial gold standard.
> According to the International Monetary Fund, 62% of the planet’s financial
> reserves are held in US dollars – more than double the total foreign
> holdings of euros, yen and renminbi combined. Thirty-one nations have
> either adopted it as their official currency or named their money after it;
> more than 66 countries peg the value of their currencies to it; and it’s
> now accepted in places as far-flung as North Korea, Siberia and research
> stations on the North Pole.
> 
> Yet, one place where the dollar is not accepted is in the tiny Czech town
> of Jáchymov ­– which is ironic, because it was here, tucked deep into the
> wooded folds of Bohemia’s Krušné hory mountains, where the dollar
> originated 500 years ago in January 1520. But as I pulled a George
> Washington one-dollar bill from my wallet in Jáchymov’s 16th-Century Royal
> Mint House museum, the very spot where the dollar’s earliest ancestors were
> coined, docent Jan Francovič smiled and stopped me.
> 
> “I haven’t seen one of these in a long time,” he said, calling over two
> colleagues. “In Jáchymov, we only accept koruna, euros or sometimes Russian
> rubles. You’re the first American to come here in more than three years.”
> 
> Welcome to Jáchymov: a sleepy 2,700-person town near the Czech-German
> border that’s both the home of the dollar and the home of no dollars.
> Chances are you’ve never heard of the place. You probably didn’t know that
> it was just named one of Unesco’s newest World Heritage sites. And you
> likely never realised that the currency that powers the free world
> originated in this one-road town still reeling from the collapse of
> communism that has more brothels than banks.
> 
> In fact, you could spend a day walking up and down Jáchymov’s main drag,
> past its abandoned Gothic and Renaissance buildings that tumble down the
> hill, around its opulent cluster of day spas at the base of the valley and
> up to its 16th-Century castle, and never realise it was the birthplace of
> the dollar.
> 
> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200107-welcome-to-jchymov-the-czech-town-that-invented-the-dollar
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