Imagine you’re strolling through a Czech Republic forest, then—wham!—you stumble across not one, but two treasure chests stuck between two rocks. A fantasy for a child perhaps?
Something similar happened on Zvicina Hill, where a hiker discovered a 7-kilogram cache filled with sparkling gold coins—598 of them, in fact! That’s not all, he also found antique tobacco boxes, vintage combs, intricately crafted wire purses, chains, and much more.
But the hiker did the honorable thing and brought the gold alongside the cache to the East Bohemian Museum in Hradec Kralove. After all, who wouldn’t want to cement their name in history?
The treasure’s secrets may not be so “sacred” after all. Miroslav Novak, an archaeologist highlights that this specific collection—for all the burials of valuables there are—lacks the spiritual reasoning that usually accompanies such acts.
Vojtech Bradle, a numismatics expert, estimates that these coins were buried sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. The puzzing part is the lack of German and Czechoslovakian coins which are thought to be common for this region.
Ancient documents and records guided historic estimates towards a post World War I hiding which fuels the search. Although the museum does not wish to speculate, they also do not deny that coins scattered and hidden in seemingly odd places were intended to be retrieved at a later date.
These discoveries answer some questions but raise others about the reasoning of where these objects were placed. Remaining speculation exists to support the notion of the joy one would feel on a hike while wandering the woods as surreal.
