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A plumber in Austria was renovating the basement of a villa when he started digging through concrete and found a box filled with gold coins. The coins ended up being worth an estimated $2.4 million.
The plumber was working in the basement of the villa in Vienna when he noticed a mysterious rope sticking out of the floor. When he pulled on the strange rope, it would budge, so he decided to take a shovel and start digging.
After chipping away at the basement floor, the unnamed plumber spotted a rusty metal box at the end of the rope. The metal box turned out to be a treasure chest filled with 66 pounds of pure gold coins. Each coin had the image of the famous Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stamped on them.
The coins were later dated back to around World War II when wealthy Europeans hid their valuables in case their homes were invaded, possibly providing an explanation for why they were buried in the basement of the villa.
Now, even though the gold coins obviously didn’t belong to him, the plumber may get to keep half of the booty. Under Austrian law the finder of the treasure and the property owner are each required to split it.
Finding a 2 million euro treasure in an old Austrian villa is great, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone has looked into the family that lived there who hid it just before WW2 and then never returned to collect it…https://t.co/5mUC68F4w7 pic.twitter.com/wwmDeUDspW
— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) November 17, 2024
“Something like that is really unbelievable,” the man told the Today show in Germany. “I have been on the construction site since I was 15. Every now and then you find a few coins, but a discovery like this is incredible.”
Interestingly, the plumber almost missed out on the buried treasure. The day before his big find, another worker at the home noticed the mysterious rope, but decided to ignore it, missing out on a possible $1.2 million payday.