The Sakar Gold Treasure is one of Bulgaria’s several gold treasures deserving the title of “the oldest gold in the world”. Photo: Museum Center for Thracian Art in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains
The Sakar Gold Treasure is a prehistoric gold treasure and one of the world’s oldest gold treasures and oldest gold artifacts processed by humans.
It consists of a total of 98 gold appliques which have been discovered in the northern part of the small Sakar Mountain in Southeast Bulgaria, near Bulgaria’s border with Turkey.
Each of the appliques has a tiny hole which was probably used to stitch the artifacts to the clothes of the prehistoric people using horse hairs.
The Sakar Gold Treasure is dated to the second half of the 5th millennium BC, i.e. the period between 4,500 BC and 4,000 BC, the Late Chalcolithic (Aeneolithic, Copper Age).
This is roughly the same period as the other prehistoric gold treasures discovered in Bulgaria, each of which claims the title of being the “world’s oldest gold”, that is, the world’s oldest gold treasure, respectively, the world’s oldest gold artifacts processed or produced by humans:
The Varna Gold Treasure, the Hotnitsa Gold Treasure, the Durankulak Gold Treasure, gold artifacts from the Yunatsite Settlement Mound near Pazardzhik as well as gold items such as beads and jewels found in the Provadiya – Solnitsata (“The Salt Pit”) Settlement Mound.
All of these, together with the Sakar Gold Treasure, date to the 5th millennium BC, the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, period, and are the product of Europe’s first human civilization, which developed in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic in today’s Bulgaria and other parts of the Balkan Peninsula, along the Lower Danube and the Western Black Sea coast, a prehistoric civilization referred to by some American scholars as “Old Europe”.
The Sakar Gold Treasure is kept at the “Museum Center of Thracian Art in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains” located at the Ancient Thracian Alexandrovo Tomb, near the town of Alexandrovo, Haskovo District, in Southern Bulgaria.
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