East European war hammer
 

Dear All,

I would love to get your opinions on that piece. Obviously it shall be a Hungarian / Polish war hammer from 17th century. But I am sceptical if it is a real thing. Length is 23cm.

Sorry for the image quality. The combination of the bad daylight and my old camera doesn´t allow better at the moment.

Kind regards
Andreas

Hi Andreas,

overall this looks good. However I am a bit sceptical when it comes to red rust (= Fresh rust) and would take it´s recent wherabouts into consideration. It would be fine if it came out of the earth recently or from a very old attic.

Stylistically these came in a wide range of phenotypes and were used not only in Poland or Hungary but surely in whole Central- to East Europe in that form. The name for this in Poland and Hungary is "Nadziak" (This is the Polish version but the Hungarian is very similar; phonetically: na​d̠͡ʑak). Decorated versions, like yours, would have eventually been more used in civil life than in battles due to the likelihood of loss and damage.

I would suggest to clean it via electrolysis to prevent possible compromitation of precious metals underneath the oxidation layer.

Best,
Patrick

I've not much to add to what has been said already. All I can add is I've seen several in the marketplace of late that have the hammer and spike ends threaded into the main part... I'm no idea if this is correct for EU arms of the era but I suspect not

Gavin

This brought me to take a second look and there is something which is suspect to me.
The combined axis of spike and hammer is not straight as it should be.
I explained this circumstance to myself with this object beeing under acute pressure while beeing in the ground. Such "fantasy" explanations with thrown together ideas in dubio pro reo are the first step to excuse dubious specimen.

The ring beeing perfectly round with mismatching axes should be a warning sign. See attachment.