Priceless amber used as doorstop in Romania

A lump of brownish stone that an elderly woman used for decades as a doorstop has turned out to be worth €1 million.

The unnamed woman found the 3.5-kilo chunk of amber – amongst the world’s largest known pieces – in a streambed near her home in Colti, a village 160 kilometres from Romania’s capital, Bucharest.

The amber is now in the keeping of the Provincial Museum of Buzau, its director Daniel Costache told the Spanish daily newspaper, El Pais.

The still-unidentified lump of amber eventually attracted the attention of the relative who inherited the property after the woman died in 1991.  He believed that it could be valuable.

Romania has important amber deposits and the fossilised resin from ancient trees is present in large amounts in Buzau province where Colti is located. The area is also home to the once-productive Stramba amber mine which the communist regime closed down as unprofitable in the 1950s.

The Colti man’s suspicions proved to be correct and he sold the amber to the Romanian state which in turn consulted   the department at the Krakow Historical Museum (Poland) that specialises in semi-precious stones.

Experts confirmed that the amber was genuine and was anywhere between 38.5 and 70 million years old.  It is now classed as one of Romania’s national treasures.

“Its discovery is of great significance both at a scientific and museum level,” said Costache, who described its value as “incalculable.”

Ironically, many years earlier, thieves had broken into the home the woman who first found the amber but overlooked it in favour of the few pieces of jewellery that she owned.

Despite the importance and considerable size of the Colti find, it is by no means the world’s largest piece of amber.

According to Guinness World Records, that title goes to the 68.2-kilo block at the Amber Museum in Gdansk (Poland).

Although the Baltic region where Gdansk is located is famed for its amber deposits the current record-holder was found in a Sumatra coal mine.

“Amber is discovered on every continent,” the Amber Museum’s director Waldemar Ossowski said when the record was confirmed in June 2022.

“It might be two million years old or more than 100 million,” he added.

Nevertheless, most of the word’s amber is found, and mined, in the coastal regions of the Baltic and the North Sea although the rarest and also the most expensive is the blue amber found in the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean.

Although it appears yellow or brown under normal light, it glows with a unique blue tone under ultraviolet light or sunlight.