The kids of one German household would have been bouncing with excitement as excavations for their new below-ground pool were going on. But imagine their surprise when men from the local council arrived to explain they had found buried treasure instead.
Described by Live Science as “the biggest treasure since 1949 in the region of Freiburg,” the State Office for Monument Preservation in Stuttgart was alerted by a man digging a trench for the pool’s piping after he noticed “small metal plates.”
Claus Völker was working on the pool in Glottertal, a small municipality in the area around Freiburg that was once the center of one of Germany’s biggest silver industries.
After he and his wife began finding more and more of the small “plates” Völker halted his digging and contacted the local council, which sent three certified metal detectives to search the trench where they found 1,000 silver coins dating to the 14th century.
Despite a local deluge turning the excavation area into a muddy soup for days, the detectives returned and were rewarded with another 600 coins.
“You could have bought about 150 sheep with the coins,” said participating archaeologist Andreas Haasis-Berner.
“These are mainly coins from the mints of Breisach, Zofingen, and Freiburg, which were minted in the period around 1320 [CE],” Haasis-Berner said in a translated statement. “In addition, there are a few coins from Basel, St. Gallen, Zurich, Laufenburg, and Colmar.”
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The evaluation of this coin hoard will hopefully better inform the history and development of minting in Breisgau—an area once a part of Freiburg, and which was controlled by the houses of Zähringen and Urach.
These dynasties from the Middle Ages controlled Glotteral when the minting activity in this area of the Black Forest was booming. In the 1940s, a hoard of 5,000 silver coins was found in Breisgau, but despite Glotteral being known as a medieval mining Mecca, until now, no coins had been found here.
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