What serendipity for a plumber going about his day to stumble upon a huge stash of pure gold coins worth £2 million (2.5 million) in a metal box beneath a cellar in Vienna, Austria. Well, it wasn’t so much stumbling as a curious act triggered by a mysterious rope sticking out of the basement floor of the villa he was renovating in the Penzing area of the capital. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but this unnamed plumber surely benefited from it. What he did next was not to ignore the rope sticking out as the builder before him had done; instead, he grabbed a shovel and started chipping away at the concrete. To his amazement, his efforts yielded a rusty metal box packed with a staggering 30kg of gold coins.
Worth $2.5 million, the gold coins that had vanished into oblivion within the concrete before World War II were stamped with images of Mozart, the famous Austrian composer. The plumber may have seen Mozart everywhere in Vienna, on posters, pictures, ads, and even napkins, but this was likely the first time his happiness would know no bounds at seeing Mozart in such a gilded form.
Now comes the matter of payment. In Austria, treasures like this are typically divided equally between the finder and the property owner. This means the plumber won’t go home empty-handed but could take almost a third or even half of the coins’ value, around $1.5 million. An unnamed friend of the plumber told German media, “Something like that is really unbelievable. 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.”
