ARCHAR, Bulgaria, April 5, 2006 - Treasure-hunting has become a profession in Archar, in north-western Bulgaria, where the 1,500 inhabitants, like many others around the country, earn their living by digging up and selling precious finds from the buried Roman settlement of Ratsiaria.

"Treasure-hunting has gone wild since the state went bankrupt in 1989 (with the fall of communism). Police were downsized and demotivated while looters got literature, catalogues and modern scanning equipment," Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National Historical Museum in Sofia, told AFP.

"It is the whole village that is digging out there. They have no other way of earning a living as 99 percent of the mostly gypsy population is unemployed," Antoaneta Nikolaeva, an expert at the History Museum in the nearby town of Vidin, said.

"Imagine you hold by the hand your hungry, barefoot child and you know that you are walking on gold. Would you not dig?" she said a gypsy looter told her recently.

Ratsiaria was the main settlement of the ancient Roman province of Mizia, dating back to the 1st century A.D. and spanning 35 hectares (90 acres) around the village of Archar.

In 1986, archeologists unearthed 13 pieces of ancient jewellery and silver spoons, numerous gold coins and a marble statue of Heracles, considered one of the best examples of ancient sculpture.
But lack of funding drove them away in 1989 until treasure-hunting fever broke out in 2000, locals told AFP.

At night bulldozers combed the area around the village as people sifted dirt for precious objects. Two of them lost their lives under the piles of earth they scavenged.

"Even 70-year-olds started digging for coins in their own backyards. Have a look around and you will not find tomatoes or onion beds in their gardens but holes," Nikolaeva said.

Six years later the area around Archar resembles the surface of the Moon, with furtive silhouettes disappearing at the sight of approaching cars.

In a field, a 30-year-old man with a metal detector and a shovel told AFP he "does not dig in the banned area but still finds things here," adding with good dealers and connections he earned enough.

Some 300 cases have been filed against looters at the Vidin regional court alone but due to slow and inadequate legislature few sentences have been given out, court data show.

Out of 15,000 ancient burial mounds in Bulgaria, dated between the 4th century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D., two-thirds have already been ravished and precious archeological data lost forever, Dimitrov said.

"Digging is usually followed by smuggling abroad and if the looters get scared they simply take the finds to the local museum. When caught, they always say they are on their way to the museum," he added.

Vienna, Munich, Frankfurt and auction houses in Italy and Britain are major centers for trading Bulgarian antiques, Dimitrov said, adding that many Bulgarian private collectors have recently helped keep national treasures in the country.

But the theft from the Veliko Tarnovo museum in Feb. of ancient jewels and coins worth €1.2 million, which were probably smuggled abroad, prompted Chief Prosecutor Boris Velchev to investigate private antiques collections to "identify the looters' mafia."

According to Dimitrov, "we need to think about a new law to substitute the 1969 one which did not regulate private collections in a country where everything belonged to the state. We also need new police measures to curb treasure-hunting."

by Diana Simeonova, Copyright 2006 Agence-France Presse