Without knowing it, an elderly woman used a piece of Romanian amber worth $1 million as a doorstop for years.
When trying to keep a door from slamming shut, improvisation is often the solution; a chair, a pair of shoes, or even a rock can serve perfectly as a doorstop.
That’s what a Romanian woman thought when she found a reddish stone weighing 3.5 kilograms in a stream in Colti, a village in southeastern Romania, and used it as a doorstop.
Unaware that it was the largest piece of Romanian amber ever found, valued at $1 million, the elderly woman used the valuable piece for years to hold one of the doors in her house open.
Amber is a tree resin that fossilizes into a semiprecious stone, and the amber known as Romanian amber has been extracted in Romania since the 1920s and is highly valued for its red hues.
After the woman’s death in 1991, one of her heirs decided to examine the stone more closely and ended up selling it to the Romanian state, which quickly classified it as a national treasure.
According to experts from the Krakow Historical Museum in Poland, where the stone was analyzed, the amber is likely between 38 and 70 million years old.
Daniel Costache, director of the Buzau Provincial Museum, where the stone is now housed, revealed to the Spanish newspaper El Pais the significance of the find: “The discovery has great significance both scientifically and museologically,” he said.
According to Costache, the nugget is one of the largest ever found in the world and the largest of its kind. Its value is, in fact, incalculable.
This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.