A doorstop became one of the largest and most valuable pieces of amber ever discovered, now classified as a national treasure.
A village woman in Romania, elderly and
apparently quite unsophisticated, used a piece of what she had always thought
was an ordinary rock to prop open her door for decades. It would be valued at
more than $1 million - in fact, a treasure in plain sight.
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| Image: Buzău County Museum |
The story started when the woman, while
outdoors, stumbled upon a 3.5-kilo stone-7.7-pound-in the bed of a stream
flowing from Colti, a village in southeast Romania. She took it home,
never knowing that it would serve as a doorstop for years to come. It was not
until she died in 1991 that a relative, now inheriting the house, began to
suspect that the "rock" might be more than just a rock. What he found
would change everything.
According to El Pais, the stone
actually constituted one of the largest pieces of intact amber in the world.
Its value? It came in at an estimate of around €1 million — or approximately
$1.1 million in U.S. dollars. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin from
millions of years ago, has a reputation for having rich, warm colors and is
prized as a gemstone.
Amber holds a particular significance in
the region surrounding Colti. This amber, known as rumanite, is found
nowhere else in such deep, richly reddish shades. It has been mined from the
sandstone banks of the River Buzau since the 1920s. Yet, despite this, it would
take years before the amber discovered by the woman was recognized for its
value. Even jewellery thieves, who once targeted the home, completely missed
the amber, unaware of a fortune right under their noses.
The amber was eventually sold by the
relative who had gained the home to the Romanian government. Experts from the
Museum of History in Krakow, Poland, were brought in to appraise it, and what
they learned was out of this world: the age of the amber was estimated at
between 38 and 70 million years.
"It is a great discovery, very
important from a scientific point of view, but also for a museum" -
explained Daniel Costache, the director of Provincial Museum in Buzau in his
interview to El Pais.
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| Image: Buzău County Museum |
Since 2022, this beautiful piece of amber
has been considered a national treasure of Romania and is now displayed in the
Provincial Museum of Buzau, in the same county where it came from.
This story of the amber of great value
might remind one of other astonishing discoveries such as that of a man from Michigan
who used a meteorite as a doorstop for many years, finding out later it was
worth $100,000. While the amber chunk would be an odd choice for a doorstop,
worth a million dollars does point to the greatest of all treasures, at times,
just being right there, well, staring one in the face. One could have purchased
a great deal of doorstops with that kind of fortune.
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