A Romanian flea-market seller thought an old machine was a typewriter and let it go for €100; the buyer, a cryptography professor, recognized a World War II Enigma I and sold it at auction in 2017 for €45,000

A Romanian flea-market seller thought an old machine was a typewriter and let it go for €100; the buyer, a cryptography professor, recognized a World War II Enigma I and sold it at auction in 2017 for €45,000

A Romanian flea-market seller thought an old machine was a typewriter and let it go for €100; the buyer, a cryptography professor, recognized a World War II Enigma I and sold it at auction in 2017 for €45,000/Image: Reuters In 2017, a machine sold for €100 at a Romanian flea market turned out to be … Read more

In the 1980s, a Swedish flea-market buyer paid just over SEK 20 for a small Buddha statue; four decades later, experts traced it to the Ming dynasty, and it sold for SEK 2.44 million at auction

In the 1980s, a Swedish flea-market buyer paid just over SEK 20 for a small Buddha statue; four decades later, experts traced it to the Ming dynasty, and it sold for SEK 2.44 million at auction

A tiny Buddha statue bought for just over SEK 20 at a Swedish flea market in the 1980s has turned into a multimillion-kronor discovery after experts identified it as a rare work from China’s Ming dynasty. The gilt-bronze statue of Shakyamuni Buddhawhich had spent decades in a private Swedish home, fetched a final price of … Read more