Thieves Blast Open Dutch Museum Door, Steal Archaeological Treasures

Thieves used explosives to blast into a Dutch museum early Saturday morning, making off with four objects described as archaeological masterpieces.

Items taken from the ​Drents Museum include an elaborately decorated 2,500-year-old gold helmet considered a national treasure in Romania, and four royal gold bracelets from around 50 BCE. The items were on loan from Romania’s National History Museum for a traveling exhibit titled “Dacia – Land of Gold and Silver” that opened in the Netherlands last July.

In the 2nd century BCE, the Dacians inhabited a vast region of present-day Romania, near the Carpathian Mountains and west of the Black Sea. This area was a crossroads for Greeks, Celts, Thracians, Scythians and Persians, a melange of cultures reflected in Dacian artifacts. The exhibit, which showcased more than 50 gold and silver treasures, focused largely on the period leading up to the Roman conquest of Dacia in 106 CE. It was already scheduled to close on Sunday, just hours after the robbery.

“This is a black day for the Drents Museum in Assen and the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest,” Harry Tupan, the Drent Museum’s g​eneral director, said of the theft in a statement. “We are deeply shocked by the events last night in the museum. In its 170-year existence, such a major incident has never occurred. It also causes us great sadness towards our colleagues in Romania.”

Of the four stolen pieces, the solid gold headpiece known as the Helmet of Cotofenesti is regarded as particularly priceless for its exceptional artistry and craftsmanship. Remarkably well preserved, save for a missing part of the skull cap, the helmet features intricate designs that reveal a fusion of cultural influences. It depicts a range of mythical creatures, and on either cheek piece, it bears an illustration of a ram being sacrificed by a man who kneels on the animal’s back, appearing poised to slit its throat with a short knife. The helmet’s eyes were crafted to protect the wearer from evil.

The helmet weighs almost 2.2 pounds. Children stumbled upon it in the late 1920s while playing on a hillside in the village of Poiana Cotofenesti, now Varbilau, after rains washed away the soil underneath the object. Archaeologists who later examined the artifact concluded it had been a stray find from a group of Thracian tribes that existed during the Iron Age.