Some Italian and American auction houses hold their most important auctions in Zurich, thanks to a man who has been dead for a long time: Leo Mildenberg. He liked to recount how he came to Zurich after being imprisoned in a Russian Gulag for a long time. In 1949, the gold department of Bank Leu hired him virtually off the street. Many banks had a gold department at that time. Leo Mildenberg ensured that Bank Leu turned its attention to numismatics, thus achieving world fame. He and his coin shop attracted an international clientele to Zurich. Soon, other auction houses set up shop there too. In fact, the private MoneyMuseum would not even exist in Zurich were it not for Leo Mildenberg’s passion for coin collecting.

The same applies to Winterthur. It still boasts an important collection of ancient coins for researchers. This is thanks to Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer, a merchant’s son who lived and worked there at the end of the 19th century. A passionate coin collector with sufficient means, he donated his first collection of 10,578 ancient coins to the coin cabinet in his hometown. (Many years later, he sold a second collection to the Berlin Numismatic Collection for a substantial sum; the proceeds financed a large part of “Greichisches Münzwerk”, a research outfit on Greek coinage, among other things. But that’s another story.)

The long and short of it is that it is often individuals who put cities on the numismatic map.