As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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A contractor saw a unique rope during a home remodeling project and followed it until he found a treasure chest filled with gold.
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The coin bears an image of Mozart, and experts speculate the discovery dates before World War II.
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Austrian law allows gleaners to share their harvest with homeowners.
It’s just human nature to want to know what’s on the other end of any mysterious rope or cable you might encounter in the world, but the results are rarely of any value, let alone millions of dollars. But one Austrian plumber hit the proverbial jackpot.
While renovating a villa in Vienna, he glimpsed a rope protruding from the basement floor and, after digging out the concrete from which it protruded, was stepped on. The rope was tied to a real-life treasure chest filled with gold, estimated to be worth $2.4 million.
The 66-pound gold coins, which date back to before World War II as each bears a portrait of the composer Mozart, were placed in a rusty metal box embedded in the concrete of a cellar in the Penzing area of the Austrian capital.
“Something like this is really unbelievable,” the man told German today Talk shows in 2024. “I’ve been on building sites since I was 15. Every now and then you find some coins, but a find like this is incredible.”
Even more interestingly, the man may keep up to half of the harvest, even though it is not his property. In Austria, the law provides special treatment for discovered treasures, allowing the discoverer and property owner to divide the treasure.
According to German media reports, this particular situation was almost in the hands of another worker on site. A few days earlier, another worker had noticed the unusual rope but ignored it. When the unnamed plumber began working in the basement and noticed the rope, he first began pulling on it in an attempt to pull it out of the ground. Since it wasn’t moving, he shoveled it onto the concrete floor, eventually removing the metal box from where someone had cemented it years earlier.
Can you imagine being the one to open this door?
Ancient coins and even coins are often found in various forms across Europe. In recent years, seven friends armed with metal detectors stumbled across Britain’s richest treasure trove in a field of farmland, uncovering 2,584 silver coins dating from 1066 to 1088 AD, worth $5.6 million.
Also in England, a couple renovating a 17th-century building on their farm discovered 100 coins from the First English Civil War. A woman found 2,150 early medieval silver coins while walking in the Czech Republic.
Sometimes you have to go underwater to find it, as in Italy, where a diver discovered 30,000 copper and bronze coins minted in fourth-century Rome. In a town in southwestern Germany, another construction worker planning to lay pipes for a pool discovered 1,600 medieval coins minted around 1320 AD.
Now, thanks to a strange cement anchor rope, Vienna is home to one of the most surprising treasure troves ever discovered in Europe.
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