She Paid $35 At A Thrift Store, She Had No Idea It Was A 2000 Year Old….

One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and every ardent thrift store shopper deeply understands this, but the phrase got too real for one Goodwill customer.

An antiques dealer may have found the bargain of the millennium after she found a priceless 2,000-year-old Roman bust – which was taken from Germany during the Second World War – for just $35 at a Texas thrift store.

Laura Young, of Austin, came across the 52-pound Roman bust at a local Goodwill store in her hometown in 2018 and didn’t think twice before acting on her intuition to buy it. Busts from a similar time period have been sold for practically $30,000, online auctions suggest.

Young said, reflecting on when she first purchased the statue:

“I got it outside in the light. He had chips to the base. He had clear repairs. He looks old. I’ve been to museums. I’ve seen Roman portrait heads before.”

She said that the statue was “pretty dirty” once she found it, and had a worker carry the 52-pound bust out to her car.

Young’s instinct proved to be the right one. After acquiring the sculpture, Young contacted art experts at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as collectors and auction homes around the country to get a sense of its authenticity and origin.

An unknown specialist confirmed it was an ancient Roman artifact, but Sotheby’s consultant Jorg Deterling was the one who resolved the era it was made in — dating back from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD.

According to historians and researchers, the bust is probably the Roman general Drusus Germanicus or Pompey the Great’s son, and was kept in the villa of a Bavarian king. One theory is that during fighting in Aschaffenburg, Germany, near the end of the war, it was taken from the museum where it was kept.

Sources: DailyWire, KUT, Theartnewspaper