The Środa Treasure

On 8 June 1985 builders digging foundations for a telephone exchange in Środa Śląska, a small town west of Wrocław, found an earthenware jug packed with 14th-century silver groschen. The police secured it and work went on. Three years later, on 24 May 1988, the demolition of the tenement next door at 14 Daszyńskiego Street broke into the same hiding place, and this time the find was far larger: gold florins, more silver, and jewellery fit for a queen.

What followed is one of the sorriest episodes in European archaeology. Before officials arrived, much of the find had been carried off, and rumours spread that more lay in the rubble dumped at the town's sports ground, where crowds went digging. Only then did a proper excavation begin, at first with schoolchildren and police cadets, later with professional archaeologists. The culture minister offered three times the metal value for anything returned, and the police mounted a nationwide search known as Operation Korona. Many objects came back; others did not, and pieces have resurfaced as late as 2005.

The star of the hoard is a gold woman's crown of the early 14th century: ten hinged segments set with sapphires, garnets, emeralds and pearls and topped by eagles holding rings in their beaks. Two segments were lost or destroyed and have been replaced in gilded silver. It is usually linked to Blanche of Valois, first wife of Charles IV of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia and later emperor. Beside it lie a great gold brooch, 13 cm across, made in southern Italy in the later 13th century around a chalcedony cameo of an eagle in the style of Frederick II's court; two pairs of gold pendants, the older of the 12th century; a clasp crowned by a tiny gold falcon; and rings, one with dragon heads, one with a star sapphire.

How royal regalia came to be buried under a house in a Silesian market town is explained by a debt. In 1348 Charles IV, raising money for his bid to be crowned emperor, pledged valuables to a Jewish banker known as Muscho, or Moses, of Środa. The prevailing reconstruction holds that the banker hid the pledge in the cellar of his house and, during the wave of persecution of Jews that accompanied the Black Death, left the town and never came back. Nobody reclaimed the treasure. The story fits the evidence well, though no document records the burial itself.

The coins tell the same mid-14th-century story: almost all are Prague groschen and Meissen groschen of the first half of the century, with 39 gold florins. After cataloguing, 7,691 silver coins were inventoried between the Archaeological Museum and the National Museum in Wrocław and the museum in Środa.

Since 1997 the jewels have been the centrepiece of the Regional Museum in Środa's old town hall. Polish writers often call it the treasure of the millennium; estimates of its value run to tens of millions of dollars, though prices mean little for objects with almost no parallels.