Thursday, May 31, 2012

Russia: A Czarist Treasure Trove Is Found





A secret room in a former home of a prince’s family in St. Petersburg revealed a hidden treasure after it was uncovered by restoration workers, the local police branch reported on Thursday.

Three sets of antique silverware, medals and jewelry pieces were immured in Naryshkin’s house since the 1917 revolution, when the family fled to the West.

The collection is to be delivered to a local museum for restoration, but after the mansion’s renovations are completed it will be returned to the house on Ulitsa Tchaikovskogo, where it was found, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported. The Pavlovsk estate has been named among most likely places for the temporary storage of the vast collection, according to the daily.

Thousands of items

The walled up niche between the second and the third floor was found by the workers on Tuesday night, but the police were only informed the next day, according to Gazeta.ru.

In total, the three dinner sets from 1872, 1914 and 1915 had over 1,000 pieces each and some items had Naryshkin’s coat of arms on them. Many of them were wrapped in newspapers from August-September 1917, and bigger items, like silver samovars were kept in boxes with pieces of cloth bearing the smell of vinegar.
Read the rest here where you will find many more photos from the newly discovered treasure.

2 comments:

off2 said...

This article is an occasion of sin for me. I am seriously coveting the fish knives. lol Bill, tGf

Jason said...

Impressive.

There's also another treasure trove of the Czar that has never been disbursed since the Czar was overthrown in 1917: the hundreds of millions that were invested and held in all of the major US and European banks at the time. These interests are probably worth over $50 billion today. I'm guessing the banks will never let them go.