3 posts tagged “interesting”

It is very interesting phenomenon: mostly all Austronesian people, Including Polynesian trace their origin to some mystical land that they call Hawaiki. While doing my research for web analytics company, I found something else. Polynesian cultures have ancient oral traditions that say that they migrated from their homeland Hawaiki to the islands in the Pacific Ocean in open canoes. Maori people of New Zealand also trace their ancestry to groups of people who traveled from Hawaiki in open canoes.

In the same oral traditions the legendary land of Hawaiki also serves like some kind of place where the spirits of Polynesian people return to after death. In New Zealand Maori people even give possible pointers to the direction in which Hawaiki may like.

Before the advent of DNA analysis many anthropologists doubted that a deliberate migration in open canoes ever happened. They preferred to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores.

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The second interesting case is the mysterious disappearance of the complete national treasury of Romania. During World War I Romania was on the side of the Entente Powers. At the beginning of the military campaign Romania was heavily losing to Germany. The situation turned out to be so bad that very soon German troops occupied Romanian capital Bucharest. Romain administration had no other choice but to send its Treasure abroad. There were heated discussions related to which Entente country would safekeep the Treasure until bad times are over. In this hard situation the decision had been made to send Romanian Treasure to tsarist Russia and keep it there until the end of the war.

So, one night almost hundred tonnes of gold bars and coins with the total cost of 1.25 billion dollars were sent to Moscow and safely got there. However, Romanian military situation was not improving and got even worse after the departure of the first transport. This was the reason why the second transport left for Russia. It included priceless items, like jewels of Romanian royalty, jewels of ancient rulers, jewels dated to the time of Roman empire and antique jewels of the pre-Roman epoque. But this was not all.

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When I was going through my web analyst archives, I found two interesting cases, when major governments of Europe were cheated and lost their treasures to Bolsheviks. The first case is related to the Civil war in Spain in the thirties of the twentieth century. It is called infamously Moscow gold case.

Short lived Spanish Republic desperately needed arms and military equipment but other European countries did not want to get involved in the civil war and did not sell anything to the Spaniards. The only country that ignored this embargo was the Soviet Union. That is why in 1937 the Spanish republic sent most of the gold reserves from its national Treasure to Russians. One must say, that at the time Spain was on the fourth place in the world for its stored gold. And the USSR got most of it, which amounted at the time to five hundred million dollars.

When Franco and his supporters learned about it, they heavily protested this transaction, stating that this gold belongs to the people and not to the Spanish government. But the transaction turned sour for the republicans because Soviets sold them all kind of military junk stored since World War I. Besides, prices were extremely inflated for each rifle and each bullet. This outdated equipment, part of which was malfunctioning right from the start, turned out to be one of the huge factors that impacted the defeat of the Spanish Republic.