Kobe thought he had stumbled on €1 coins while digging trenches for a sewage system at a former brewery in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde. Then the 18-year-old student saw a gold bar and realized the find was far bigger than anyone on the site had expected.
The hoard, found on Tuesday, is estimated to be worth about €9m, or roughly £8m. It included gold coins, nuggets and numbered bullion bars, and was discovered as labourers laid drainage pipes at the site on Van Langenhovestraat.
Kobe said the shock was immediate. “It’s just not something you expect when you’re working on a regular Tuesday morning,” he said. He and his colleagues called the police and notified CAW Oost-Vlaanderen as soon as they understood what they had uncovered, and the treasure was later moved to a secure facility in Brussels pending an investigation into who legally owns it.
That question matters because the gold was not sitting out in the open. It had been stashed in a bag inside a bricked-in cellar wall beneath the grand villa built for Theophilus Van Assche in the late 19th century, at a property that once housed brewing activity from 1899 until 1970. The building is now being renovated by CAW Oost-Vlaanderen to create new offices and housing, and the find has turned a construction job into a legal puzzle.
Hanne Ollevier said authorities must first verify that the bullion was not stolen property or the proceeds of criminal activity. Under Belgian law, finders must wait at least five years for possible owners to come forward, which means the discovery is unlikely to be settled quickly even though it was made in plain sight during routine work.
There are already several possible claimants in view. The building contractors, the welfare organisation and descendants of the Van Assche family could all argue for a share of the fortune, while Piet Buyse said the Van Assche fortune had certainly stayed in the family. Kobe, for his part, said he would not have expected much if the find had been just a few coins, but he added that a finder’s reward would be welcome if one ever comes. For now, the biggest question is not how the treasure was found, but who can prove it was theirs all along.
