A $13,000 flea market impulse buy was a lost imperial egg
A scrap-metal dealer bought a jeweled egg for its melt value, then learned it was one of the Tsars' vanished Fabergé treasures.
In 2004, an American scrap-metal dealer paid roughly $13,000 for a small gold object at a flea market in the American Midwest, intending to melt it down and sell the metal. When the price of gold didn't make the math worthwhile, he set it aside instead — and let it sit, unrecognized, for close to a decade.
It was the Third Imperial Easter Egg, one of around fifty jeweled eggs the House of Fabergé made for the Russian imperial family between 1885 and 1917, before the Bolsheviks seized the collection and much of it scattered. This particular egg had been missing since the 1920s, known only from an old auction description and a single blurry photograph, long enough that some historians assumed it had been melted down decades earlier by someone who also didn't know what they were holding.
In 2014, the dealer searched an online article about a missing Fabergé egg out of curiosity and recognized his own mantelpiece decoration in the photograph. He contacted a London jeweler who specializes in the House of Fabergé's work, who confirmed it. Reports of the eventual sale price range from twenty million to over thirty million dollars.
The part worth sitting with isn't the payout. It's the years the most valuable object in the room sat in plain sight, valued only for what it weighed.