Hit at the local newspaper! (Tubantia)
HELLENDOORN — Say something about North Korean currency and Jeroen van der Heiden (20) from Hellendoorn tells you everything about his hobby: collecting coins from the Asian country. “It’s a very special country and that is what fascinates me. And collecting coins was always my thing.”
On eBay, Jeroen is searching for an aluminium coin with the portrait of Kim Il Sung on it. “Kim Il Sung is the former leader of North Korea who died in 1994 and is the grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong-Un. I don’t think anyone in The Netherlands has this coin for sale, but it’s possible some other collector who I don’t know owns it. I will leave no opportunity unexplored in the search for this coin.”
How many of these coins are in circulation is unknown. “That is the appeal of collecting North Korean coins,” says Jeroen. “The collector will find out on their own how rare those coins are. No one outside North Korea will ever know how many banknotes are printed or how many coins are minted.”
While browsing through the albums you can see the diversity and bright colors. “You can clearly see the propaganda. But it doesn’t make the currency ugly.” It’s not always easy to get those coins. “Because of sanctions from America you can’t auction North Korean goods openly, this actually happens by using special code words. Don’t be surprised if you find them searching for ‘garden rake’ as the desired result. I’m that kind of person to know how to find these coins. Now I need to find the Kim-Il-Sung coin.”
And… how was this done?
I have many weird hobbies — this is one of them. For my IT school I had to make a website completely written in HTML5 and CSS3. My idea was to “digitize” my collection completely. Win-win.
- All banknotes were scanned with an EPSON Perfection V330 scanner.
- The coins were photographed with a Nikon D5000 camera.
- All cropping and editing was done with GIMP, an open-source PhotoShop look-alike.
The site has since been rebuilt as a proper WordPress CMS to make catalogue updates easier.