Famed Florentine diamond surfaces in Canada after century-long disappearance | Canada

[ad_1] On the top of the Battle of Britain, when the UK authorities wanted a secret location to retailer 186,332 gold bars, it turned to Canada.

Shipped throughout the Atlantic and saved beneath a rapidly constructed vault in Montreal , Operation Fish grew to become recognized each for the huge quantities of gold concerned – and the immense secrecy that adopted.

The lesson: Canada and its banks can preserve secrets and techniques.

So it ought to maybe have come as little shock {that a} famed diamond, as soon as feared misplaced to historical past, has surfaced after sitting inside a Canadian financial institution vault for many years.

The Florentine diamond, a 137-carat pear-shaped stone that glimmers with a “nice citron” hue, adorned European royalty for hundreds of years. However after it mysteriously disappeared on the finish of the second world battle, historians and consultants feared the diamond had been stolen, minimize up or hidden away in South America.

However a report from the New York Times has revealed a distinct historical past: the prized jewel as a substitute remained a carefully held household secret, with few dwelling heirs ever being informed of the diamond’s location.

After the primary world battle, the Austro-Hungarian emperor Charles I had prized jewels moved to Switzerland for safekeeping over fears of Bolshevik and anarchist uprisings. He and his household later fled to Switzerland in exile.

A glass duplicate of the Florentine diamond. {Photograph}: Common Historical past Archive/Common Photos Group/Getty Photos Uprooted as soon as once more in 1940 because the Nazis moved swiftly throughout Europe, Charles’s spouse, the Empress Zita, fled the continent together with her eight youngsters, arriving in the USA with the jewels in a cardboard suitcase. The household then travelled to Canada and settled within the province of Quebec.

“My grandmother felt very secure – she might breathe lastly,” Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen, a grandson of Charles I, informed the New York Instances. “I assume that, at that stage, the little suitcase went right into a financial institution secure, and that was it. And in that financial institution secure, it simply stayed.”

On the time, solely two dwelling individuals, her the empress’s sons Robert and Rodolphe, have been informed the place the diamond had been hidden. Zita requested they preserve the situation – and the diamond’s existence – a secret for 100 years after Charles’s demise in 1922. Earlier than their deaths, the brothers handed the data to their very own sons.

“The much less individuals find out about it, the larger the safety,” stated von Habsburg-Lothringen.

Zita returned to Europe in 1953, leaving the jewels on the financial institution in Quebec. She died practically 4 many years later, at 96.

The storied historical past of the diamond – probably owned by Charles the Daring, in all probability owned by Florence’s Medici household and most definitely the property of the Habsburg dynasty – partially fuelled competing explanations about its sudden disappearance. So too did its murky origins. Some speculated that its irregular octagonal define with a minimize that included 126 sides mirrored how stones would possibly as soon as have been minimize in India. One other concept is that the diamond was minimize by a European – the famed Flemish jeweller Lodewyk van Bercken – right into a pyramidal form.

The disappearance of the stone prompted hypothesis it was among the many Austrian jewels stolen by Hitler when the Nazis annexed the nation, or that American troops had positioned the diamond and returned it to Vienna. One other was that diamond was dropped at South America, recut after which offered in the USA. Some posited that the Habsburgs, determined for cash as their empire crumbled, offered the diamond and different possessions.

Briefly, the Shah of Persia, a 99-carat stone recut from bigger diamond, was believed to a part of the lacking Florentine. Others recommended a recut diamond supplied on the market in Geneva in 1981 might as soon as once more be the Florentine.

However the stone unearthed in Canada is most definitely “the real, historic ‘Florentine Diamond’”, stated Christoph Köchert of AE Köchert, as soon as Austria’s imperial courtroom jewellers.

The household says it is going to show the diamond at a Canadian museum within the coming years, including that it gained’t be up on the market – they usually gained’t disclose how a lot it may be price.