Have you ever thought that in order to find a treasure, you don’t have to go to some incredible distance, but just look around your home, think, reflect and logically determine its location in your living areas? It turns out that this is quite possible; you should not assume that a treasure in your home is an idea from the realm of fantasy. Especially if the building is more than 50 years old. Old buildings are an ideal place where you can probably find a treasure, albeit small. After all, the concept of “treasure” does not necessarily mean a pot of gold - even a few coins, banknotes or jewelry from a century ago can be very valuable.
So, how and where to look to find treasure at home? If you are the owner country house, which was built by your great-grandfather, then you can guarantee that the first finds may be in the door and window blocks and even in cash. Although, at first glance, these places may seem incredible, but, as the practice of treasure hunting shows, coins, various buttons, pen feathers, small objects, receipts and much more are found here that can be of interest to both collectors and government officials. museums.
The second generally accepted place is the joints of the mother beams of the floor structure. Of course, it is not so easy to get to them, and you will have to stock up on tools in the form of a hatchet and a prybar, since you will have to remove flooring to get to the specified location. To be more confident in finding valuable items here, you can use it, although without special preparation for working with it, it is not difficult to be deceived and mistake forged nails and staples for valuables, by means of which the uteruses were fastened together. But silver coins or even banknotes can be a pleasant bonus; it was customary to hide them here for a “rainy day.”
By the way, there is still such a tradition as “wasting money” at a wedding, when guests and toastmasters begin to shower the newlyweds with small change and then force the bride and groom to collect it, either by hand or with the help of a broom and dustpan. Naturally, some coins “sank” under the baseboards and rolled into the cracks, perhaps in order to wait for the treasure hunter in your person.
Another Russian tradition is to ensure the well-being and prosperity of a house when it is founded. To do this, coins were placed under each corner. And the more prosperous the owner of the house was, the higher the value of the banknote. Of course, it’s not always easy to get to the corner, but considering that the coined money that went out of circulation was quite large diameter, and the logs on the corners have practically turned into dust over time, it is quite possible to find such a treasure.
The rubble of a house is also considered an ideal place to look for antiques. Their top layer contains a lot of debris and rotten iron, but under the rubble there may be objects of quite decent size, including clay pots, bottles, knives, axes, and in some cases even weapons. On, you can see that many valuable items were found precisely under the rubble.
The attic space also holds many secrets. In principle, we are also not used to immediately throwing away unnecessary things and tidy them up in some secluded corner. And the attic most often becomes such a corner. Here you can find not only ancient utensils and household items - some people turned the attic into a storage place for quite valuable items. Therefore, such findings as antique books, mirrors, weapons, coins, chests self made and many many others.
If you decide to become a treasure hunter and are going to purposefully search for treasures, then in this article we will try to list the most effective search methods, as well as those characteristic places in which treasures are most often found.
Since ancient times, the earth has become a reliable storage Money, jewelry, weapons, and even clothing. In a word, everything that a person treasured, trying in this way to protect his money and other valuables from robbers, fires, wars and other disasters, of which there were many at all times. But often, for various reasons, all this stuff remained in the ground, never being claimed by the owner; these caches are discovered today by search enthusiasts with metal detectors, who accidentally or specifically search in places where such treasures can be found.
Where to look for “household” treasures?
If we talk about money found by search engines in the ground, then depending on the amount found, they can be divided into two groups - treasures and wallets. The fact is that before the earth they trusted not only those funds that were put aside for a long time, but also those that were used constantly - coins were often deposited into these hiding places, or, conversely, some were taken for necessary needs. These insignificant savings are called wallets, and those savings that were deposited for a long time can be called full-fledged treasures.
When we think about treasures, our imagination immediately conjures up huge pirate chests filled with jewelry and gold. Of course, there are such treasures on the territory of Russia, but for the most part, the caches found by search engines contain insignificant, at face value, funds hidden in distant years by one family and which are its savings.
The statistics of the treasures found indicate that the more troubled the time, the more more people they hid treasures, trying to save what they had earned. For example, there are much more caches associated with the pre-Petrine period than those buried in the 19th century. The general stability in the country, the ability to invest funds in growth, the development of culture, and other factors influenced the fact that less and less treasures were buried. But such moments in history as the revolution of 1917 and the collectivization that followed it, the dispossession of the wealthy layer of the peasantry - again forced people to turn to the land for help in preserving what they had accumulated.
An interesting fact is that almost always treasures are found not at all deep, at the depth of a spade bayonet. Why? Yes, everything is very simple - by burying money in the ground, its owner had to be confident that at any moment he could get it out without wasting time on it. If he buried a “wallet” in the ground, then it was even more in demand, and he literally sprinkled a handful of earth on top or laid it with stones, so as not to often dig into the ground and look for his treasure.
In order to determine where to look for treasure, it is necessary to understand the psychology of behavior of those people who hid them. Often this happened inside the home, without leaving the four walls in which they lived! The fact is that old houses had earthen floors. This practice of building houses existed in the middle of the last century! And how convenient it is, and also hidden from prying eyes- after all, if you bury treasure in the garden, then this process can be seen by someone else, but in the house you could safely hide and quickly disguise traces of the hiding place. Moreover, this method of storing money and valuables could be used all year round, winter and summer!
It is known that many settlements that once existed on the territory of Russia disappeared without a trace in different time and for various reasons - where the war intervened, where there were diseases, and where there were fires... The territory now occupied by ancient villages is also not a constant. To put it simply, villages “floated” over the centuries, moving in one direction or another, and this was due to the same reasons. If there was a fire in a village, several houses, or even the entire settlement, burned out at once. The residents, not wanting to leave the village itself, nevertheless did not want to build in the same place where misfortune befell them, so they put new house away from the ashes. But the savings buried in the ground could remain in the old place, never found by the owners... Therefore, treasures in such places are often found at some distance from the existing estates. This is a sign that previously housing was not located where it is today.
When planning to look for a treasure, you need to carefully approach the issue of searching for such a historical place where there could be similar caches, where people settled and lived for a long time. To identify a place, you need to stock up on maps, preferably from several time periods, as well as a modern map of the area. Thanks to modern methods overlaying maps and linking the coordinates of ancient objects to modern coordinates, it is enough to simply establish the location of those settlements that interest you, including those that have disappeared. As a rule, many natural objects remain static for centuries, clearly indicating the place where you should start looking for treasure.
If the search location for the treasure has been determined, you should pay attention to the location of roads, rivers, fields and forests, which can also help in finding treasures. Treasures are often found near conspicuous places - big trees, stones, river bends. You can identify such places when you are still only conducting cartographic preparation.
When you are at the site of a future search, do not rush to look for the treasure. Try to look at this territory through the eyes of those people who lived here several centuries ago. Imagine where houses could stand, where there should be a watering hole, and where there should be a river crossing. Such analysis sometimes unmistakably suggests the place where the treasure may be hidden.
The flat areas of the tracts may well turn out to be those objects that need to be given maximum attention - after all, this is where houses could stand in the old days! Examine them with passion. As a rule, in such places there will be some increased concentration of iron objects, which will indicate to you that the place has been chosen correctly. Other signs will indicate this, for example, fragments of ceramics, often found in places of old settlements. IN old houses there was no stone foundation, logs were often laid on the ground, so the boundaries of the house’s location could be blurred and not clearly defined.
As you move around the tract, try to determine, as far as possible, the contours of the houses that once stood here: there is a high probability that the treasured pot may be right here. Work out iron signals too, since the cache is with ancient weapons can be no less valuable than a handful of silver!
Of course, it is very important to know at what time the village existed and when it disappeared. This determines which approach to use when searching for treasures. If you are lucky enough to find a settlement that has disappeared more than a hundred years ago, then you need to check any signal. Please note that treasures were hidden not only in clay pots- the pot could be cast iron, therefore, such a signal can be missed. Treasures were also hidden in iron cans (this happened in a later period; as a rule, such caches date back to the end XIX beginning XX century), so this possibility cannot be discounted either, you just have to be careful about this probability.
Where to look for robber treasures?
Until now, we have only talked about treasures that were present, so to speak, in everyday life, in the old family and way of life. But there are other treasures that can be discovered - these are robbers' treasures, treasures of trading and traveling people. In order to find such a treasure, a different tactic is needed.
Such treasures are found on ancient roads, along trade routes, far from cities and villages, in places surrounded by forest or on passes.
Household treasures have been discovered in Russia since enviable consistency. And in Middle lane, and in the South, wherever people have lived from time immemorial, hiding places can be found. The probability of finding such a treasure is very high, since previously everyone who had it buried money, it was a general action.
Treasures are not open to everyone, but if your goal is to find the treasure, you will have to work hard before this happens. Search for a treasured place, as well as preliminary preparation, will take a lot of time, but all these costs can be justified by a great find.
It remains for us to add one very important clarification. Before looking for a treasure, familiarize yourself with the existing legislation, because having discovered a treasure, you must fulfill a number of conditions dictated by the Law. You should not neglect these conditions if you do not want to get into big troubles instead of the joy of the find.
We briefly got acquainted with what kind of treasures there are, as well as where to look for them. It depends on you how successful the search process will be. But do not be upset if, despite all the efforts made on your part, the treasure was not discovered. We are confident that a search in such places, even if it does not yield treasure, will yield many other finds related to the past of Russia. Some of them can be even more expensive than treasures, so sit down with your cards, look for a place and may luck accompany you in your search!
To find any large treasure, you need great luck, worse than what is required to win the lottery... But look into a museum or an antique shop and you will see a lot of ancient objects. Are all these discoveries really a matter of chance?
Sometimes this happens. For example, in 1985, a resident of the city of Gorodets named Moshkin was digging a hole in his garden. Suddenly his shovel came across some rusty piece of iron. Moshkin took it out of the pit and, just in case, took it to the local museum. When the museum staff cleaned the find from dirt and rust, they gasped. In their hands was a grand-ducal helmet with traces of gilding and the initials of the owner. Now this helmet is one of the most unique museum exhibits Nizhny Novgorod region, and many are sure that it belonged to Alexander Nevsky himself. But the story of this discovery is rather an exception. Professional treasure hunters are lucky precisely because they know exactly where to look for hidden treasures.
Or remember how an expensive Swiss watch was dropped into the river, what a commotion it was, but the greatest variety of valuables can be found where people used to live, especially in public places, for example, in the area where old markets, shops or taverns are located . This means that before you start searching for treasure, it would be a good idea to stock up on old maps of the area. They will help you understand where life was in full swing in the old days. Well, what if there is no such card? Then various knowledge from the field of history will come in handy.
Thus, on modern maps you can often find villages with the name Yam. And this is no coincidence: from the 12th to the 18th centuries, a postal station was called a “pit” (hence the word “coachman”), in which racing horses were kept. At these stations there were inns and stables, in short, in the old days they were kind of hotels, and they were built, of course, on major roads and crossroads of trade routes. And the small river Mozzhinka near Zvenigorod was named so because robbers lived in these places, who brainwashed merchants passing by.
In old settlements, pay attention to the relief. A slight elevation of the ground may hide the foundation of a former building. In some places there was a tradition: builders placed a coin under the corners of the log house on the foundation - for good luck. So, having found an old foundation, it makes sense to find its corners... By the way, knowledge of local habits and traditions is also very important for a treasure hunter. For example, valuables hidden in old houses are most often found under window sills or in attics. But it is less common to find something in the basement and cellar, but it was in the ground that truly expensive things were hidden. In large and rich houses, treasure hunters especially carefully inspect the floors in children's rooms, because some decoration or coins that a child played with in the old days could have gotten into the gap between the floorboards.
Hi all! The treasure is the climax of the cop that we all probably strive for. Everyone, everyone, dreams of finding at least a small pot of coins. Even with Nikolaev copper. Still a treasure.
Treasures are usually found by accident. And mostly not treasure hunters purposefully ringing the ground with metal detectors, but ordinary people, far from a cop. And even children. Children are curious and climb everywhere. So they come across stashes left a hundred - two - three years ago. But sometimes diggers are also lucky in their treasure troves.
Finding treasure requires luck. If there is no luck, then you won’t get the treasure. There really is luck in our business. Some are destined to find rariq, and others a couple of kilograms of wire.
You must communicate well with the local population, and especially with the old residents. After all, the elderly owners village houses is a treasure trove of information about these places. They have seen a lot in their lifetime, and rumors about treasures and riches were also passed down from their fathers and grandfathers. They will always talk about their once rich neighbors, who lived where in the village. Moreover, in remote places, where there are always few people, the locals will be happy to talk to you.
You should not lose sight of the stories with legends about treasures. After all, it’s not all that easy. There must be some truth! It’s just that over time the legends acquire more and more new details. Especially about the size of the treasure and its contents :) For example, I visited different parts of the Siberian highway and everywhere I heard stories from locals that Empress Catherine the Great passed through here and hid a couple of barrels of gold.
It even happens that there are witnesses to how in childhood they saw someone in the old days burying their wealth. I also heard such stories, and some even had a happy ending - the raising of the treasure. But, mostly, older people forget the place during all this time. Or they cannot recognize it only because it has changed: houses, buildings, fences have disappeared. The trees have grown, and some have already been cut down or fallen. The landmarks are lost.
We have a fairly large abandoned village nearby, where there are many red brick houses. So, in one of them they found rubles and fifty kopecks of Nicholas II in the wall. They just caught the signal and hit the wall. And from there, large gray round pieces rained down with a ringing sound. Can you imagine this?! 😮. Someone just got lucky...
By the way, for some reason people like this fascinate me stone houses. You always want to dig into them and poke around. After all, at that time it was an expensive pleasure to build such a home. And you can always find some stash. On the review in the pit topic, I saw reports with gold from under the stove. What a long way to go! This spring Sanya raised a stash of a few nickels near the stove in the stone two-story house. In such places, you can run into an interesting find at any time. Everything found in this house:
Or you might just wander through a plowed field and come across a treasure being plowed. You will immediately understand this when you come across similar coins one after another: be it the denomination, for example, Catherine’s nickels, the material (silver) or approximately the same period. Of course, it is labor-intensive to dig for such treasures. There are a lot of signals to be dug up. You will be lucky when you come across the core of the treasure, from which the plow scattered some of the coins across the field. But there is not always a core. For example, when we were digging, we didn’t get a cannonball.
Only armed with the necessary information about treasures, tips, historical information You can with a high degree of probability find what is hidden! And chance and luck will help you!
The task was simple. Write about how they search for treasures and how much it costs as a hobby. But life turned out to be much more diverse. Details in the photo report. As they say, believe it or not.
The whole story began, as usual, with a random call. On Saturday, my boss and I were going to relax in nature in the company of treasure-hunting friends: drink beer and eat barbecue, and at the same time watch how many people “in the soap” with metal detectors are constantly digging for something. After all, as they say, there are things that you can look at endlessly: fire, water and other people's work. But since meteorologists promised prolonged rains for Saturday, the prospect of sitting and freezing in open field in the middle of the clay abysses of the Vladimir region, 50 kilometers from the nearest settlement didn't seem particularly attractive to us. Therefore, it was decided to spend the weekend doing a less extreme activity, namely reading the accumulated fiction.
"Golden fever"
Saturday, contrary to forecasts, turned out to be sunny and warm, but for us this no longer mattered - the enthusiasts left early in the morning without us. At three o'clock in the afternoon I received a call from my friend Peter. Out of breath, he blurted out: “We found a treasure. Within an hour we had already obtained 30 nickels in excellent condition. We’re digging, turning off the phone...” As a lyrical digression, I’ll say one thing: finding even a few old coins is a great rarity, but a collection of any coins, namely a treasure, is an event that an enthusiastic digger will remember for many years, and at least six months will be discussed in various forums and conferences.
Let me explain for non-professionals. Burying coins in the ground is an old Russian pastime. Of these coins, 99.9%, due to mass production, represent only a piece of non-ferrous metal with a half-erased bas-relief and are sold in any antique store or on numismatic sites at a price of $1 per piece.
Go into your grandparents' piggy banks, take out those silver coins that you consider "terribly expensive", and estimate their value on the Internet. I'm afraid you will be very disappointed. This is memory, not wealth.
But let's continue. On Sunday, Peter came to see me and joyfully said: “We were digging until dark, we dug up 140 pieces, everyone had to run errands and go to work, we’ll go dig it up soon.” According to estimates, there should have been another 150 to 350 coins left in the ground.
As a farewell gift, a colleague gave me a half-worn nickel from 1796, twice the size of a Soviet ruble. In general, a weighty thing, for happiness and good luck. There is such a sign about coins from the treasure.
On Monday, a group of amateur diggers could no longer think about anything other than their treasure, and it was decided to go to the site on the night of Monday to Tuesday: “Dig, dig, and dig again!” Enthusiasm is a contagious thing, and I suggested that the boss go with his colleagues, look at the treasure, and, if possible, write a short report for our readers. Alas, on Tuesday the boss had about 3 meetings and 2 interviews... Finance company- this is not a place where you can “get away from work” in the middle of the week. Reluctantly, I was released with the treasure hunters under a rather fictitious pretext. I always trusted the boss’s intuition, maybe something interesting would turn out.
Beginners are lucky
And now the outpatient clinic. Upon arrival, the group of enthusiasts discovered mud, rain and a huge dug up surface at the site of their discovery. I can't put into words the expression on their faces. Grief and sorrow reigned over the field. Various shades of sadness were read in the eyes, ranging from quiet sadness to deep despair. From the outside, they resembled people who were informed of the death of all their relatives at once, and not one left a will. In general, “the enemies burned his home and killed his entire family,” as in the song.
There was nowhere to go. I took out my metal detector, which I bought for some reason last spring and have never touched it since then for various reasons (from inability to use it to a deep hatred of any digging in principle), and melancholy began to wander with it along the edge of the grassy slope, enjoying the shimmer of sounds from the speaker made by old buckets, shovels, nails, beer caps and pieces of wire and cigarette foil that were found in abundance in the ground.
But then the metal detector beeped suspiciously. Friend Peter, who was nearby, immediately dug huge hole. At the bottom of the pit were found fragments of a broken pot the size of a sugar bowl, thickly mixed with small and large silver coins. From the expression on Peter’s face, I realized that it was precisely for such a moment that any treasure hunter would be willing to dig his whole life. For me personally, this moment came in the middle of some garbage dump on the outskirts of the road, 20 minutes after I picked up a metal detector for the second time in my life. And, apparently, the latter, because, as mentioned earlier, I don’t like digging and don’t believe in treasures.
Alas, among the half-erased silver “round pieces” there was not a single rare coin. This was easily installed using GPRS internet and Peter's laptop. An unpleasant moment for us was the cost of GPRS in roaming. Very quickly we spent all the money on Peter’s phone, and then on mine.
JEEP-safari, or “PatriotIZM” in Russian
Further inspection of the trash heap revealed the presence of two shovels, one ax, and an unlimited number of pieces roofing iron and nails. I will sadly remain silent about foil and beer caps. Those who dug will understand. Damn corks are perfectly preserved in the ground and “scream” exactly as loudly and clearly as real coins. And considering that beer with metal caps began to be made already at the end of the 19th century... You can imagine the scale of the “disaster”. Tired of fruitless searches, we decided to move to a neighboring field, where, according to assumptions (namely, according to the map on a CD, which has been sold in any sports and hunting store for ten years now) there was once a village.
Alas, the UAZ-patriot shamefully sat on its belly on the first muddy section of the road. The Chevy Niva pulled us out twice until we finally sat down. I think it’s funny to call a car an SUV that doesn’t have wheel locks, and that, when it hits a clay road, begins to helplessly skid with its two wheels “diagonally.” To be fair, otherwise I have no complaints about the Patriot. A huge and quite comfortable car.
At nine in the evening, Petya’s friend Slava from Aleksandrov came to our rescue and heroically got stuck in the mud next to us (his JEEP at that moment did not have a front driveshaft, and he drove to our land on rear wheel drive). Later, the same Slava called friends from Aleksandrov to a ZIL-131, which in pitch darkness finally pulled both Slava and us out. The field by this time had turned into a large muddy swamp.
Now about the money. How much did we earn and how much did we spend?
Our expenses:
2 metal detectors: – 28,000 rubles
Shovels, covers, batteries – 3000 rubles
Gasoline – 2,000 rubles
Shish kebab-beer-barbecue-charcoal: 2000 rubles
2 pairs of boots: – 800 rubles
2 XB suits: 1000 rubles
Socks in boots: - 800 rubles
Washing the car and interior from clay - 1000 rubles.
Sciatica, wet feet and runny nose, as well as scandal from wives - free of charge.
The task is completed, we will live!
As for income, a handful of silver, when valued at an online auction, will cost a maximum of several thousand rubles. And such rare successes happen to approximately every hundredth treasure hunter once every 10 years. In such cases, it is easier to give coins to friends and acquaintances “for good luck” than to go to your home state or to private appraisers.
Even if you become the owner of rare coins, you will be given a maximum of 10% of their value for them. However, we are morally in the black. And the main thing is the fulfillment of the editorial task. The order was to find the treasure and make a report about it - it was done. These are the rules in our company. The company generously decided not to claim the treasure.
As for you, dear readers, by God, I don’t advise you to even try. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic treasure hunters dug through the Moscow and adjacent regions more thoroughly than hundreds of excavators. In places where there used to be villages there have long been standing garden plots, and the fields were plowed thousands of times by tractors. So treasure hunters are usually happy when at least one copper coin is found on country roads during a day of continuous digging. True, I know people who have made money from this, but there are very few of them.
If, after reading this story, you still decide to go treasure hunting, remember: one of the minimal elements equipment is a set of metal detectors worth 200-300 thousand rubles each, a couple of jeeps and at least one escalator on a trailer.
However, every weekend thousands of people go to the same places and “dig and dig and
they're digging." Well, I’m unlikely to receive a second task to find the treasure, so I’ll be collecting mushrooms “retirement style.” My family won’t forgive me for another trip like this. The life of a henpecked man is not easy, you know. What can we say about hunters and fishermen... Many will understand me. As for the treasure, consider it a work of fiction. But the photos of the trip and the photos of the excavations are genuine. Radiculitis and runny nose too.
Take care of yourself.
Treasure is money or valuable objects buried in the ground or otherwise hidden, the owner of which is unknown and cannot be found or has lost the right to it. According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, the discovered treasure is divided equally between the finder and the owner of the land (building, structure) where it was found. However, the treasure hunter and the owner of the land can agree in advance on other proportions for the division of the treasure.
If the treasure hunter has not received the consent of the owner of the land (building), where he subsequently discovered the treasure, to search, then the treasure is completely transferred to the owner of the land (building).
If the objects contained in the treasure are of artistic value, they are transferred to the state. The state pays a reward for this in the amount of half the value of the found treasure. This amount is divided between the treasure hunter and the owner of the land (building) as described above.
People hired to search for treasure, as well as those for whom searching for treasure is part of their professional duties (for example, archaeologists), are not treasure hunters and cannot lay claim to the treasure.
N.B.
This story is based on real events, the coins in the photographs are dummies. The material was created for readers interested in the subject and is educational.
P.S.
You understand that this story is true, right?