Back in 1964, Jan Gunnar Fugelsnes and his brother were playing beneath an old church in a space that had been hollowed out by Nazi soldiers to store ammunition, when the two schoolboys came across a stash of 14 silver coins, an amber pearl, and nine needles.
The boys took the coins home and stashed them in a yellow Kodak slide box for the next 60 years until Fugelsnes came forward with the coins recently. He said in a press release,
We were just children on a treasure hunt under the church, we didn't realize how rare the coins were.
The coins turned out to be extremely rare. Carl-Fredrik Wahr-Hansen Vemmestad, a local archaeologist who examined the coins said that,
Elsewhere in Central Norway, there are literally only a handful of such coins that have survived to our time. The coins give a unique insight into the Middle Ages in Edøy.
Some of the coins date back to the thirteenth century, with the "newer" coins in the collection dating back to between 1450-1481, during the reign of Christian I of Norway.
Any coins produced before 1650 are considered property of the Norwegian government, so after 60 years in their yellow Kodak box, Fugelsnes surrendered his extremely rare coin collection to the Møre og Romsdal County Municipality where they will be preserved for future generations to see.
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