10 January 2025 , 13:39
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As a second world war loomed, caretakers of a cathedral in Lithuania decided to hide its royal treasures.
Their plan worked — but their hiding spot took 85 years to rediscover. A team of museum employees and church officials gathered at Vilnius Cathedral last fall to plan another search for some medieval royal treasures believed to be hidden in the crypt. They didn’t have any reason to be particularly hopeful. Every previous search — metal detecting, radar scanning, thermal imaging — had ended in failure.
But this time, the searchers took a different approach. The team got a thin wire-like camera, poked it into cracks or crevices in the basement and looked for the hidden treasures, the Vilnius Archdiocese said in a Jan. 6 news release. The first searches found nothing. Then something on the camera caught the team’s attention. They carefully opened the cavity and found the royal treasures sitting inside.
Photos show the artifacts being removed from their hiding spot. A gold crown and gold chain are clearly visible despite the accumulated dirt.
Officials identified the finds as royal burial insignia dating back at least 450 years. The treasure trove included three crowns, a scepter and orb, jewelry, a medallion, several silver plaques and other artifacts.
Photos show the trio of crowns after being cleaned. One crown was made for the Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland Alexander Jagiellon, who died in 1506 and was entombed at Vilnius Cathedral.
Two other crowns belonged to the wives of the Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland Sigismund II Augustus, officials said. The first wife, Elizabeth of Austria, died in 1545. The second, Barbara Radziwiłł of Lithuania, died in 1551. Both were entombed at Vilnius Cathedral.
The royal graves were forgotten then rediscovered in the crypt in 1931 during a flood cleanup project, officials said. A few years later, in 1939, caretakers decided to hide the cathedral’s valuables to protect them from whatever World War II might bring.
After the war ended and Lithuania gained its independence, cathedral officials searched for the hidden valuables. In 1985, they found the church treasury hidden behind a wall of a staircase in the sanctuary. The royal artifacts, however, took several more decades to find.
Archbishop Gintaras Grušas of the Vilnius Archdiocese described the recent finds as priceless historical artifacts and symbols of Lithuanian statehood. He thanked the many people and institutions who helped search for the hidden treasures over the years.
Officials plan to restore the artifacts and put them on public display.
Vilnius Cathedral is in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, an eastern European country bordering the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Latvia and Poland.