5 Drachmai Pattern

Greece's monetary system was rebuilt almost from scratch following independence, with the newly installed Bavarian king Otto and his regency council commissioning pattern strikes to establish viable denominations before regular coinage could begin. This copper piece dates to that exploratory phase — 1833 was a year of proposals, rejections, and revisions as the nascent mint infrastructure and foreign advisors argued over what Greek coinage should look like. Most patterns from this series never advanced to circulation strikes.

The Karamitsos and Divo references confirm this as a documented trial rather than a fantasy piece, but surviving examples are genuinely rare by any measure of Greek nineteenth-century numismatics.