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Most people can only dream about being lucky enough to encounter some buried treasure in the wild. However, some hikers in the Czech Republic were able to turn that fantasy into a reality after coming across a box filled with gold coins that are worth a very pretty penny.
Gold has been used as a form of currency for over 2,500 years, as the king of Lydia (an Iron Age kingdom located in what is now Turkey) is credited with being the first person to order the minting of coins made with the precious metal around 800 B.C.
The value of gold has spawned wars, mass migrations, and captured the imagination of plenty of treasure hunters who have devoted a ton of time and resources in search of lost fortunes contained in shipwrecks and purportedly stashed away in remote and hard-to-reach locations where it may never be recovered.
Some hikers who were making their way through a forest in the Podkrkonosí Mountains in the Czech Republic earlier this year didn’t set out on a quest for gold, but they nonetheless managed to find some after spotting a couple of containers in a stone wall during their trek.
According to CBS News, the unidentified outdoor enthusiasts excavated a metal box containing jewelry, a comb, and bags of tobacco in addition to an aluminum jar with some slightly more noteworthy contents in the form of the 598 gold coins that were minted in a number of different European countries in the early 1800s and eventually restamped to designate their use in Yugoslavia at some point in the 1921.
The haul ended up in the hands of experts at the Museum of East Bohemia, who estimated the coins are worth around $340,000.
It’s not entirely clear why the coins were stashed away in the first place, but Miroslav Novák, the head of the museum’s archeological department, floated two primary theories.
One is that they were hidden after the Nazis invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939, but he also suggested it they could have been stowed by a German who was planning to return to find them in the wake of deportations initiated after the end of World War II.
Per Czech law, the hikers who found them are entitled to 10% of the total value, and the museum plans to display the recovered items at some point in the future.
Content shared from brobible.com.