Hikers shocked to discover gold coins and theyre worth a fortune: My jaw dropped
Stumbling upon loose change has never been so lucrative.A pair of hikers in Czechia hit the jackpot after stumbling upon a cache of gold coins and jewels worth over $300,000 — which some historians speculate could’ve been purposefully hidden from the Nazis.
“When he [one of the hikers] opened it, my jaw dropped,” said Miroslav Novak, head of archaeology at the Museum of East Bohemia, where the treasure trove was assessed, the Daily Mail reported.The incredible find was revealed in a recent Facebook post.The unnamed alpinists had been hiking the Czech Republic’s Podkrkonosí Mountains earlier this year when they happened across a small aluminum can and an iron box.After peeping at the priceless contents, they brought it to Novak for evaluation.Inside the iron box was a horde of gold objects: sixteen snuff boxes, 10 bracelets, a wire bag, a comb, a chain and a powder compact.Meanwhile, the can harbored 598 gold coins, which were “divided into 11 columns, each wrapped in black cloth,” per the archaeology buff.
These unearthed artifacts are unsurprisingly worth a pretty penny — millions of them.“We will need to analyze the rest, but at the current price of precious metals, the value of the find can start at 7.5 million [Czech] Crowns ($340,000),” estimated Nowak.However, he declared that the “historical value of the treasure” is priceless.
Coin expert Vojtěch Brádle noted that many of the money pieces were marked with dates ranging from 1808 to 1915.They originated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire when it was ruled by Franz Joseph I.“I found out that these coins did not travel from the Vienna mint to us, but to the Balkans,” he said.“And there, after the collapse of the monarchy, in the then-Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, marks, so-called countermarks, were minted.”He added, “The treasure was hidden in the ground for a maximum of slightly over a hundred years.Interestingly, the coins hailed from many different places.
Some...