A treasure of 142 Romanian "koson" coins weighing more than 1.2kg has been turned in to police by a local resident of Mount Orastie in western Romania.
The collection has been valued on the black market as worth nearly €85,000.
The 142 koson are a highly valued part of Romania's national heritage. They individually weight between 8.20 and 8.80g and date back to the second half of the 1st century BC.
The coins were presented at a news conference on Thursday at the Alba Iulia National Union Museum, reports Financiarul.
The coins were turned in by a local of the western city of Hunedoara who said he kept them as a good faith curator, said Deputy Prosecutor General with the Alba Iulia Court of Appeal Augustin Lazar.
Preliminary expert conclusions say the coins are authentic and will be turned over to Romania's National Museum of History in Bucharest.
According to Financiarul, the koson is a controversial currency as it includes equal influences from Greeks and Romans, making its exact provenance hard to determine.
One koson weighs little over 8g, which is higher than the weight of the gold coins used by the Romans.
The three toga-dressed people on one face of the coin could be Roman citizens. The vulture keeping a wreath in its claws could be the symbol of a barbarian monarch.
Although the first koson were found near Orastie, the coins are made of a gold alloy, but Dacians, the forerunners of today's Romanians who inhabited the area, never minted gold coins.
It is thought that the coins were likely to have been minted under Koson, King of the Dacians, hence the use of gold instead of the Dacians' usual silver.
Historians argue that the koson were scattered in the same area because Dacian King Decebal did so with his treasury in the face of Roman danger in 106.
