Incredible Coin Collection Was Buried for Decades

A coin collection with an intriguing backstory is so big—and so valuable—that auctioneers Numismatica Ars Classica are splitting the sale into 15 auctions over the next four years. The auctioneers say the collection of around 15,000 gold and silver coins, some of them thousands of years old, was buried in a garden for 50 more years. NAC Director Arturo Russo says the collector developed an "obsession" after the Wall Street crash of 1929, the Financial Times reports. "By the end of the 1930s, he was going to major auctions and making sophisticated, rare finds in the field around the world," Russo says. Fearing a Nazi invasion, the man buried the coins in cigar boxes—and died of a stroke soon after German troops entered his country.

The auction house hasn't disclosed the man's identity or homeland. Russo says that after the collector's death, the only person who knew where the coins had been buried was his wife, who waited until the mid-1990s to unearth them. Cataloging the collection "was like going to a candy store every day for us," he says. The auction house says the collection includes coins from more than 100 territories. One of the most valuable is a 100 ducat gold coin of Ferdinand III of Habsburg, CNN reports. Minted in 1629, it's made up of 348.5 grams of gold. The collection is valued for insurance purposes at $100 million, but the auctions of what NAC calls the Traveller Collection could fetch much more.

The first auction, on May 20, will include some of the collection's British coins. David Guest, director of David Guest Numismatics, helped catalogue some of the collection. He says some of the coins were so rare, and of such exceptional quality, that he "had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming." Guest says the coin market has been "buoyant" for a while. He says people like owning a piece of history, the FT reports. "Coins were the mediation between leaders and their subjects, a projection of image and power," he says. "They were a way to celebrate peace or war. They were the social media of their day."

(More coins stories.)