Cache of gold coins, other treasures found by hikers in Czech forest

A quiet trek through an overgrown forest quickly turned into the discovery of a lifetime when hikers in the Czech Republic found a cache of antique gold and other treasures worth almost half a million dollars.

The hikers stumbled across the lucrative loose change and jewels earlier this year while hiking in the Podkrkonosí Mountains, according to a Facebook post from the museum now in possession of the items.

A small aluminum can and iron box concealed the true treasure, but after the hikers took a peek inside the vessels, they knew they had discovered something special.

“When he [one of the hikers] opened it, my jaw dropped,” Miroslav Novak, head of archaeology at the Museum of East Bohemia, where the treasure trove was assessed, said in an interview published in the Daily Mail.

Inside the dirty and corroding containers were 598 gold coins wrapped in black fabric, 10 metal bracelets, 16 metal snuff boxes, a comb, a chain, a wire bag and a powder compact.

Local media reported that the coins alone are valued at 7.5 million Czech crowns, which is about C$470,00.

The coins appear to have been “hidden in the ground for over a hundred years,” according to Novak, and are dated from 1808 to the early 19th century.

The historical value of the treasure is priceless, he said.

In the Facebook post, Novak says valuable objects were often buried for safekeeping, with the owners intending to come back to them. In this case, however, there are theories that they might have been hidden amid Nazi Germany’s annexation of the region in the 1930s, or were perhaps hidden by Nazis themselves, toward the end of the Second World War.

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Coin expert Vojtěch Brádle noted that many of the coins 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.”

Some of the coins were traced to Serbia in the 1920s and ’30s, while others were from Turkey, Romania, Italy, Russian, France and Belgium, Popular Science reported.

The rare discoveries are now being researched, cataloged and preserved, and work is underway to determine the origin and value of the other objects and jewelry.

As for the hikers, Czech law mandates that they be given a finder’s fee of up to 10 per cent of the treasure’s total value.