Two people on a walking tour of Zvičina Hill near the town of Dvůr Králové nad Labem in the Czech Republic discovered a trove of early 20th century gold objects including hundreds of coins, jewelry and cigarette cases. The variety of objects, their recent age and sheer quantity of gold makes it one of the most the exceptional hoard finds on the Czech archaeological record.
The tourists first spotted the a lidded metal cylinder in a stone wall on the edge of a field. The vessel contained 598 gold coins in 11 stacks wrapped in black fabric. About three feet away, they found a metal box containing an unusual combination of objects: 10 bracelets, 16 cigarette cases, an evening bag made of fine wire mesh, a comb, a chain and a powder compact. They are all crafted of a yellow metal, presumably some alloy of gold.
The finders immediately handed over the trove to the Museum of East Bohemia in Hradec Králové. The museum’s numismatist identified coins ranging in date from 1808 to 1915, most of them of French origin, with some examples from Austria-Hungary, Belgium and the Ottoman Empire and a few from Italy, Romania and Russia. The most recent date is not when they were deposited. Several of the Austria-Hungary coins have been counter-stamped, stamped with a miniature mark added to coins in the 1920s and 30s in the former Yugoslavian provinces of Serbia or Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Therefore the earliest the treasure could have been concealed is 1921, but the counter-stamps could have been added later than that, and then somehow the coins had to get to Bohemia. The location of the find on the former border between Czech and German settlements suggests the hoard may have been cached in 1938 when Nazi Germany occupied the region and forcibly removed the Czech inhabitants. Another possibility is after World War II when the German inhabitants were expelled, or during the resettlement programs of communist Czechoslovakia after 1948.
Assuming the yellow metal objects are made of gold, the total weight of the gold in the cache is seven kilos (15.4 lbs), with the coins alone accounting for 3.7 kilos (8 lbs) of the total. Based on that, current estimates of the treasure’s value is more than 7.5 million Czech crowns ($342,500). The discovery is being analyzed by the Assay Office of the Czech Republic to determine the metal composition of each object and therefore the market value of the precious metal content, but of course their historical value will exceed the simple weight. Once the entire treasure has been assessed, the finders will be legally entitled to a reward, and in this case it’s going to be a big one. By Czech law, fingers can receive either up to 100% of the market value of precious materials, or up to 10% of the historical value, depending on the final decision of the evaluation committee.
* This article was originally published here
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