Explosion rocks Dutch museum before gold masterpieces stolen: "This is a dark day"
Thieves responsible for the Drents Museum heist left with a gold Coțofenești helmet and three Dacian royal bracelets, the museum said.
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Who could but such things but very wealthy private collectors? We're these items sold, pre-heist?
these were not for sale. These were, like, artifacts of national importance. It's not the gold of them that is valued so much as it is the historical value.
I realize that. Surely the robbers knew they couldn't sell them on the open market. I'm asking if some unethical private collector paid to acquire.
At this point, I think this is a highly likely scenario. Back in the 2000s, there was some huge fuss made about some other Dacian bracelets found and illegally smuggled across the border. They managed to find them all some time in 2012 or so, but the authorities did put lots of resources into the investigation, calling Interpol for help as well.
The thing is that Dacians were a hugely influential people around the area in the ancient times, yet so little was left from their civilization. We have no clue about their language, what alphabet did they use (if they used any) or whether they wrote anything, and most of the written sources from other people like the Greek, or the Romans, who held outposts in their area, like in the port city of Tomis (nowadays Constanța) - where Ovid was exiled. All we have left are a few words, like barză (stork) or mânz (foal) which most linguists recognize that they have an unknown origin, albeit unsure whether they could actually be Dacian or not. All other words were lost in time due to Romanization, then due to assimilation of other words from the migrators of the last half of the 1st millennia, like slavs, goths, cumans, and after that from hungarians, germans, greek, ottomans (turks) and others who rulled or otherwise exercised control or influence across the land (that's how modern day Romanian got created).
What we do know however is that they were a regional force to be reconned, so big that the Romans needed two full wars to conquer them - as they did not accept the Roman influence and were basically a pain in the ass during winters, when the Danube was freezing, and they could freely raid the bordering Roman provinces. In fact, Dacia was the only Roman province from across the Danube (not even fully conquered), and the wars against it were so fierce that Trajan raised a column right in the middle of Rome with depictions of the battle.
So physical artifacts are all that more important to get a glimpse into how these people were living. And here they're quite a sensitive subject too, as Dacian artifacts were also part of the treasure that Romania sent during WW1 to Moscow to safeguard - and never fully returned to this day.
As such, I'm not sure any collector who would get their hands on these would be happy to their collection. Or make the public aware of them owning the objects (except if they are in one of the countries we got colder relations with, such as Russia). They'll probably show the items to some close people who they trust to stay silent about it, and that's it.