Beneath Trier lay the largest gold coin hoard of the Roman imperial era

On 9 September 1993 an excavator is digging into the ground in Trier. A new car park is going up on the grounds of the Mutterhaus hospital on Feldstraße, and the bucket tears a bronze vessel apart. It is filled to the brim with Roman gold coins that nobody has seen for almost 1,800 years. The driver notices nothing. In the end there will be more than 2,500 coins, about 18.5 kilograms of gold. The Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier calls it the largest gold coin hoard of the Roman imperial era anywhere in the world. Our new episode, the first in our series "Verschollen" (lost and gone), follows the hoard from the cellar of a Roman town house to a display case of armoured glass.

An excavator, a lorry and a hotel car park

The gold is loaded onto lorries with the spoil and leaves the site. In the afternoon, amateur collectors spot the first coins at the edge of the pit and follow the lorries across town. The trail ends at the Kockelsberg on the west bank of the Moselle, where the spoil is being levelled for a car park at the Hotel Kockelsberg. Soon construction workers, lorry drivers and hotel guests are all searching. More than 400 gold coins turn up that same day.

A cash reserve that grew for 130 years

Roman Trier was called Augusta Treverorum, one of the largest cities north of the Alps, a trading centre and a seat of administration. The Porta Nigra was built around the year 170. For large sums Rome used gold, the aureus, a coin of just under eight grams. Karl-Josef Gilles, the scholar who studied the hoard, sees the gold in the bronze vessel as most likely a state treasury rather than private wealth, and the museum follows his reading. Nobody knows who managed it.

The reserve held coins from around 130 years. The oldest were struck around 63/64 under Nero, and roughly a third of all the pieces carry his portrait. Close behind comes Vespasian, who commissioned the Colosseum. Altogether the coins show 29 faces from the imperial family. They amount to about a tenth of all aurei known from this period. According to Gilles, around 80 to 90 of the types were previously unknown or unpublished.

Two hiding places and a civil war

The main series ends in 167/168 under Marcus Aurelius. Gilles suspects the money was first hidden after that date, perhaps when the Antonine Plague reached the region. He bases this on an inscription from Trier, so it is a hypothesis, not proof. Afterwards the reserve stayed almost untouched for decades. Right at the end only six more coins were added, struck between 193 and 196 under Didius Julianus and Septimius Severus.

In those years Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus fought for the throne, and the war reached Gaul. An inscription from 197 confirms that Trier was besieged. Probably in 196, someone buried the reserve in the cellar of a town house. He never came back for it. The house fell into ruin and the city kept growing on top of it.

An evening on Feldstraße and a plastic bucket

By evening, word has spread through Trier that there is gold on Feldstraße. One of the collectors from the afternoon comes back with a metal detector. He is Erich Eixner, then in his mid-forties and a hobby searcher, who by his own account had permission from the museum director and the building firm. He finds a lump of 1,389 aurei fused together, and next to it the lower part of the bronze vessel with another 561 coins inside. That same night he phones the museum, and his words have been handed down. "Herr Gilles, I might have a few gold coins for you." The next morning he carries the find into the museum in a plastic bucket.

In total 19 people hand in what they found, which brings the count to 2,518 coins out of an estimated 2,650 or so, about 96 percent of the hoard. According to Gilles, the roughly 130 missing coins were withheld from the museum. They vanished into private hands rather than staying in the ground, because dozens of people combed through the spoil on the day of the find.

So many people handed in their finds because of the Schatzregal, the treasure law of Rhineland-Palatinate. Significant finds belong to the state, and finders receive a reward at the authorities' discretion. That discretion led to a dispute. Eixner says he was first promised a million Deutschmarks. By his own account he received about 20,000 marks. According to one newspaper report, the reward was also reduced because he had entered a cordoned-off excavation area. Whether that was fair is for each reader to judge. What is clear is that using a detector at an archaeological monument without a permit is no grey area. It is a criminal offence.

The night the armoured glass held

Twenty-six years later the hoard is the star of the museum's coin cabinet. In the night before 8 October 2019 at least two masked men climb a scaffold, break open a first-floor window and attack the display case with a sledgehammer. The armoured glass holds. The alarm is ringing, the police arrive within a few minutes, and the intruders escape into the palace garden without a single coin. They leave behind their tools and their sports bags.

On one of the bags investigators find DNA. It leads to a then 28-year-old man from the Netherlands, who is sought on a European arrest warrant and extradited in December 2020. On 24 August 2021 the regional court in Trier sentences him to three years in prison for attempted theft in a particularly serious case. According to his confession, he kept watch outside. Who swung the hammer is still unknown.

Not a single coin is missing. The state then invested more than a million euros, and since 10 September 2022 the coin cabinet has been open again with around 14,000 coins. The hoard's pure material value is well over a million euros. For researchers that is the least interesting number about it.

What the map knows, and what it does not

Would a map have known about this hoard? The honest answer is no. The mineral data on our map has not a single entry within 25 kilometres of Feldstraße. No geological map records a treasury buried in the cellar of a house, and the find site itself is now part of the hospital grounds. Why that is true in general is explained in our article on maps that promise gold.

What the map does know is the ground around it. When we queried our data in August 2026, there were 34 caves and adits documented within ten kilometres of the find site, among them the Genoveva cave and the Hochburg caves. There are also old adit entrances, many of them flagged as dangerous. Never enter adits or shafts.

Within 25 kilometres our data holds 76 fossil records at 17 locations, almost all of them on the Luxembourg side of the Moselle. At the harbour of Mertert, about 14 kilometres from the find site, the marine reptile Nothosaurus and the sea lily Encrinus liliiformis are recorded in the Muschelkalk limestone. Despite its name the sea lily is not a plant but an animal on a stalk, related to starfish. The Muschelkalk is the floor of a sea that covered this area more than 200 million years ago. Mertert has also produced a record of a Triassic shark, and near Wasserbillig there are Ice Age rhinoceroses.

Seeing the hoard for yourself

The gold hoard is kept in the coin cabinet of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, and as of August 2026 it is on display there. Please check opening hours and admission on the museum's website before you go. At the find site on Feldstraße there is nothing to see, because it has been built over, and the Kockelsberg is no gold field. In most German states metal detecting requires a permit, and illegal digging at archaeological monuments is a criminal offence. Our motto sums it up: look, marvel, don't dig.

The photographs of the hoard in the video are real (Th. Zühmer, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier), including the picture of the find with the torn vessel. The aurei shown in close-up are example coins from other collections and are not part of the Trier find. The scenes from antiquity and from 1993 were generated with AI and are labelled in the picture. They are illustrations, not footage. The orecast map shows what is documented around Trier, and the video tells the whole story in about 16 minutes.

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