Reliquary of St. Maurus

[1] The reliquary was created for Florennes Abbey in Belgium in the first quarter of the 13th century to hold the purported skeletal remains of St. Maurus, St. John the Baptist, and St.

After the sacking of Florennes the reliquary was placed in the local church and later bought by Duke Alfred de Beaufort-Spontin in 1838.

In 1984, American businessman Danny Douglas approached Czechoslovak authorities (via the embassy in Vienna) with an offer to pay 250,000 USD for the right to excavate and export abroad an otherwise unidentified object “which nobody here misses anyway”.

Police officers arrived to the location with a large team of men and with metal detectors and were searching all the surroundings, digging several holes in garden and outside the castle.

When searching the floor in the old castle chapel they identified that a large metallic object was below and after removing the wooden boards they discovered the St. Maurus reliquary on 5 November 1985.