BURIED TREASURE

Evening Star, Issue 20983, 23 December 1931, Page 12

BURIED TREASURE

A SLOVAKIAN SEARCH GYPSY FRAUDS Czechoslovakia’s latest craze is the treasure hunt—not the modern variety with motor cars, pretty partners, and pocket flasks, but the good oldfashioned digging for the buried treasure of robber chieftains (says the New York ‘Times’). The excitement began near Pistyan Spa, where a wealthy American woman, who had read of the hidden treasures of the Slovak robber captain, Janosik, financed excavations, which after some weeks yielded a few human hones, probably those of Turkish janissaries. Although the treasure hunter went unrewarded, it proved good business for the local peasants, who were ready to dig as long as anyone would pay, and soon crinkled yellow parchments covered with plans resembling those of Stevenson’s ‘ Treasure Island ’ were brought to light wherever there was a Turkish burial,, hill or ruined chapel furnished with the appropriate legend by the village gossips, provided there was some well-to-do stranger in the neighbourhood. In the midst of the treasure hunting excitement a gipsy named Ladislas Szarkozy came one day to a proseprous Bratislava merchant for whom he had done a few odd jobs, bemoaning the world crisis, and muttering darkly; “ If I could lay my hands on a little capital I could be as rich as Croesus.” Reluctantly he confessed that he knew the hiding place of the huge treasure of Brigadier Ocskay, a French corporal under Louis XIV., who had made a fortune fighting with the Hungarian leader Hakoczy, had betrayed him, been captured and executed without ever rcvea.ing the location _ of his great wealth. From under his greasy shirt the gipsy produced a yellowed and crumpled parchment for which the merchant gave him 1,000 crowns. After 1 some difficulty the merchant obtained permission to excavate and bound himself by agreement to give a tenth of his find to the parish of Bory, where the treasure was supposed to be hidden. The heirs of the treacherous corporal who still lived there claimed the whole of any treasure found, and'an expensive legal battle followed before an agreement could he reached. At last the excavations began—bones and iron jars were unearthed, but no gold. Meantime the police discovered that the gipsy was offering a second parchment to another wealthy man, declaring to him that this contained the true secret of the corporal’s gold, the first one being a worthless document. The gipsy was arrested and brought before the magistrate. Experts discovered that both “ parchments " were clever forgeries. They were only of hand-made vellum soaked in oil and ironed out with an ordinary flat iron, the mysterious drawings and wording being supplied by the young gipsy himself. When the magistrate expressed amazement at the skill displayed in the forgeries the youth replied “It is an age or progress also tor us, gracious sir. With the old gipsy tricks one can never make one’s way in the modern world.”