Owner Comments:
A sleepless night had snared the Queen. Her heart became swallowed by fire with the mere thought alone that on the morrow she would be forced to part with her dear child, her dearest little Otto, for a long time or even forever. Casting their gaze from the high window into the vast December darkness of the night, her wet eyes could see nothing and no-one except for the countenance of her beloved son. She perceived the tiny rosy-cheeked smile of his youngest years, his crawling on all fours down the endless corridors of the royal palace, his playfully frantic attempts to evade and escape from his royal servants… and his first lessons at riding on horseback - such a genuine and beautiful young Prince, fair and kind down to his very core.
“For Thou art a kind and loving God! Speed Thy help and fortitude to my dearest Otto!” - soundlessly whispered the lips of the stricken Queen - “For he is yet so young, innocent, and untested to be given reign over an entire sovereign nation! O Greece! Such a unfamiliar faraway land with unfamiliar characters, speaking a unfamiliar language and praying unfamiliar prayers over faded icons of unfamiliar saints in their darkened underground places of unfamiliar worship! How is he to rule over them, to lead them? Who is to aid his hand there, so far from the wisdom of his familial guardians? Only Thee, O Lord!” - and thus she silently continued to weep and pray, pray and weep.
Frigid night shrouded the town of Aibling, the final frigid night to be spent in Bavaria - after which only God would know the whereabouts of her dearly beloved son. The Queen Theresa desired to be together with her son until the final moment - and the final moment had cruelly arrived. For tomorrow her Otto would depart with a cavalry unit into the distant South and she would be left to return to the hollow palace and to spill the sacred tears of an inconsolable and truly loving mother.
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The Prince Otto had left the country of his birth prior even to his own Coming of Age and returned to Germany 30 years hence, a balding failed monarch that fled the throne and lost the crown of a country he adored - only to die in Bavaria, the land of his mother, who did not see her son triumph as he had in her dreams. Up to that moment, the efforts of the inhabitants of Aibling with the help of King Ludwig had produced a proud monument to Theresa the Mother, who had lost her son to another land for ever. The first stone of the foundation was placed into the ground on the fifteenth of October on the birthday of King Ludwig, and on the first of June 1835 - Otto’s twentieth birthday and the commencement of his rule as monarch of Greece - the magnificent monument was complete. With sharp edges and contours and in Gothic styling, it gloriously personified the bottomless depth of a mother’s enduring love. Etched in gold upon the plaque were the immortal words:
“Theresa the Queen of Bavaria wept bitter tears in parting with her beloved son Otto. O how she would rather they had been tears of joy!
"Otto, second son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, here shattered the heart of his mother that he may be King and savior of Greece.”
“Inhabitants of the land of Rosenheim, and sympathetic women from all over Bavaria have here immortalized the sacrificial love of the Queen-Mother"
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In the present day, if one were to visit the moderately-sized town of Bad-Aibling and to stroll along the river shore, smelling the fragrant aroma of spring flowers - one would come across a beautiful Gothic monument from which gazes a forlorn woman, pressing to her bosom a young child. Either this is the Birthgiver of God Mary Herself holding the infant Jesus, or it is the melancholy Theresa clutching at young Otto her babe — regardless, this is a monument to all mothers and their eternal love towards their children, the beauty and majesty of which is like nothing else on Earth!
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German Talers since 1800 by John S. Davenport
Bavaria, King Ludwig Series (1825 - 1848).
Taler 1835, OTTO MONUMENT .
Davenport 575, KM 778 (409), Thun 67, AKS 134, J.49.
Commemorative - for the separation of the Queen Therese from Her son, King Otto of Greece.
Obverse: Head of the Ludwig I to the right, LUDWIG I KOENIG VON BAYERN. ZEHN EINE FEINE MARK
Reverse: DENKM. DER TRENNUNG DER KOEN. THERESE VON IHREM SOHNE DEM KOEN. OTTO, ERRICHTET BEI AIBLING VON BAYERISCHEN FRAUEN, Monument 1835 below.
PCGS MS 62.
28.0600 g., 0.83300 Silver, 0.7515 oz. ASW.
Clear mirror fields, patchy patina, touch of rainbow toning - uncirculated and attractive coin.