The First Gold

The unassuming name Ada Tepe stands for an archaeological sensation. Europe’s oldest prehistoric gold mine was located in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains. From as early as 1500 B.C. until the end of the Bronze Age around 1000 B.C. the precious metal was mined here. In 2016 scholars from the Austrian and the Bulgarian Academies of Sciences began to study the finds.

Selected artefacts from the largest Bronze-Age hoard are now on show for the first time in the exhibition “The First Gold”. A virtual reconstruction and finds from the mine document the lives of the people who toiled there. The Valchitran Treasure which comprises gold objects weighing around 12,5 kilograms, forms the centre of the show. It symbolizes the wealth and the technical skills of the age. Masterpieces produced in the late Classical/Hellenistic period and during the Roman Empire document the importance of Bulgarian gold, which can look back on 3500 years of history.

The exhibition is organised by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in collaboration with the National Archaeological Institute with Museum, Academy of Sciences, Sofia (NAIM) and the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology (OREA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.