Coin Museum OR Sepah Bank Museum

The project of Coin Museum OR Sepah Bank Museum was initiated in 1342 SH by Farajollah Agha Vali, then head of the bank, and it was later, in 1352 SH, that the museum established after ten years of coin gathering, in the ground floor of the central building of Sepah Bank, located in the southeast side of the former military shooting range. After the extension of the museum’s activities in 1395 SH, it becomes larger and newer. The museum has three main parts namely the coin gallery, painting gallery and the gallery of Sepah Bank based on history.

The evolution process of the coin along history is exhibited in the gallery of coin. Coin and money have a rather long history and their story is full of mysteries and contradictions. Money makes powerful relations by which people use common criteria to investigate their assets and liabilities. Before two thousand years ago Aristotle found out that people exchanged their items before the invention of the money and this was known as Metadosis, after that the business exchange becomes easier. In the coin gallery of Sepah Bank some rare and old coins related to different periods in the history of Iran are on display indicating the realities of the past to the present. Each coin shows the economic, social, cultural and artistic issues of its own time.

The oldest coins of the museum are related to Achaemenid empire, Lydia city. The first coins of Achaemenid empire were minted in the reign of Darius I and become known as Derik. The maquette of mint that had the duty of making handmade coins is also on display in this part of the museum. The second gallery or the gallery of painting constitutes of fifty contemporary paintings created by the highlighted painters of Iran; interesting among them are Sohrab Sepehri, Reza Mafi, Iran Doroudi, Sadegh Tabrizi, Hossein Zenderoudi, Mohammad Ahsaie, Masoud Arabshahi, Hossien Mahjoubi, Hossein Kazemi, Naser Oveysi etc. the third gallery shows the history and antiquity of the first Iranian bank that is Sepah Bank. This first Iranian bank was established in 1304 SH in Sepah street of Tehran and other branches of this bank were later founded in cities like Mashhad, Hamedan etc. after 1306 SH.