Funeral Wisdom of the World

When I was going through my web analyst archives, I found two interesting cases, when major governments of Europe were cheated and lost their treasures to Bolsheviks. The first case is related to the Civil war in Spain in the thirties of the twentieth century. It is called infamously Moscow gold case.

Short lived Spanish Republic desperately needed arms and military equipment but other European countries did not want to get involved in the civil war and did not sell anything to the Spaniards. The only country that ignored this embargo was the Soviet Union. That is why in 1937 the Spanish republic sent most of the gold reserves from its national Treasure to Russians. One must say, that at the time Spain was on the fourth place in the world for its stored gold. And the USSR got most of it, which amounted at the time to five hundred million dollars.

When Franco and his supporters learned about it, they heavily protested this transaction, stating that this gold belongs to the people and not to the Spanish government. But the transaction turned sour for the republicans because Soviets sold them all kind of military junk stored since World War I. Besides, prices were extremely inflated for each rifle and each bullet. This outdated equipment, part of which was malfunctioning right from the start, turned out to be one of the huge factors that impacted the defeat of the Spanish Republic.

The second interesting case is the mysterious disapperance of the complete national treasury of Romania. During World War I Romania was on the side of the Entente Powers. At the beginning of the military campaign Romania was heavily losing to Germany. The situation turned out to be so bad that very soon German troops occupied Romanian capital Bucharest. Romain administration had no other choice but to send its Treasure abroad. There were heated discussions related to which Entente country would safekeep the Treasure until bad times are over. In this hard situation the decision had been made to send Romanian Treasure to tsarist Russia and keep it there until the end of the war.

So, one night almost hundred tonnes of gold bars and coins with the total cost of 1.25 billion dollars were sent to Moscow and safely got there. However, Romanian military situation was not improving and got even worse after the departure of the first transport. This was the reason why the second transport left for Russia. It included priceless items, like jewels of Romanian royalty, jewels of ancient rulers, jewels dated to the time of Roman empire and antique jewels of the pre-Roman epoque. But this was not all. Russia also received for safekeeping archives of the Romanian Academy, priceless religious artifacts and manuscripts and even multiple deposits that citizens kept at the Romanian banks. It is impossible to estimate the value of the second second transport, the value of the first transport could not even stand close to this one.

And then Russian Bolshevik Revolutions of 1917 happened. And, as you many know, Bolsheviks refused to abide and respect an treaty signed by tsar and previous government. Numerous attempts of Romania to recover its national treasure were futile. Then only stuff that Romania got back was bits and pieces of the archives in 1935 and small part of the paintings and ancient objects in 1956. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union all negotiations with the present day Russia failed. And there is no hope that national Treasure will ever be returned back to Romania.

Even now there is a lot of talk about pirate treasure. That talk, naturally, consists mostly of gossip and rumors and nothing else. But still…  Would not it be good for us to know that here and there people dig out bags of gold, silver and such, left to us by generous pirates?

For several centuries, people somehow believed that pirates often buried their stolen bounty in remote places. It seems that they searched for pirate treasure since 1795. Why would they do that. you may ask? The popular belief was that pirates had intentions to return for their stuff later. But how would they find the treasure, you may ask again? Well, here comes the great belief in specially drawn, and sometimes heavily encrypted treasure maps!

In fact, this is all a hoax, you know. There were several extremely popular books published in nineteen century that popularized the myth of buried pirate treasure. Mind you, these books were written by great authors and they still excite minds of the children and grown-ups.  Naturally, we are talking about nobody else, but Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving and Robert Louis Stevenson!

All three famous writers separately learned about one and only one story about buried pirate treasure.  It seems that for all those centuries there was only one more or less verifiable story that some pirate buried part of his treasure. It was infamous William Kidd, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. He was an English privateer who went astray. He did not want to die on the gallows for all his sins, so as story goes, he hid some of his wealth on Long Island before sailing to New York.  That hidden stuff was his bargaining chip in negotiations with authorities. But this did not work, they hanged Billy the Kid by the neck for piracy.

As far as I know, nobody found Kidd’s treasure on Long Island yet. But as a result, we have great fiction stories: Treasure Island, The Gold-Bug and Wolfert Webber written by the authors mentioned above.