This is most worrying. I've been acquiring these things for 35 years now, and I shall need to take a closer look at some of them...
Not all of them will be
fakes, though. As Mark points out, there are
plenty of excavated and published specimens, and tens of thousands of them have come to light on archaeological sites. I bought my very first one from a Turkish gentleman who was actually from
Gaziantep, and I've no doubt that it's genuine. At that time, very few such items were coming onto the market, there was scarcely any literature on them, and renowned
auction houses were describing them as "theatre admission tickets" or similar. I've also obtained several unusual
types, erotic or mythological, which I've never seen in duplicate, suggesting that they are originals (because such
types, if they could be copied, would fetch far more on the market than the comparatively boring material on
eBay).
But... fifteen years ago I was offered a bucketful of bullae at the Charing
Cross Collectors' Market in
London. I intended to cherry
pick them, but noticed how many duplicates there were, and that all of them
had much the same colour and texture,
soapy surfaces and low relief. I was sure they were
fakes, and I didn't buy any. Some of the
auction lots in the link given by areich remind me strongly of the contents of that small bucket!
Are the
fakes Bulgarian work? I've been to coin fairs in
Bulgaria and not seen any there. Can any of Forum's
Bulgarian members help on this?
- Francis