It’s not every day that you stumble upon something unique and valuable by accident. This is precisely what happened to Mr. Gamage in Sri Lanka when struck Serendipity, quite literally.
In the mid 2020, a workman while digging a well in the backyard of Gamage’s house hit something. It was a gigantic stone that forced him to stop digging further. When Gamage looked at the stone he realized that his lady luck was smiling on him.
Finders Keepers
Mr. Gamage, who is a third generation gem trader, didn’t take long to look through the layers of mud. He immediately understood that what’s in front of him is not an ordinary stone but a cluster of star sapphire. It weighed a whopping 510 kilograms or 1125 pounds. After a painstaking process of cleaning the rock he got hold of some loose gemstones, which confirmed his earlier assessment.
Later, in July 2021, he secretly reported his find to Sri Lanka’s National Gem and Jewellery Authority (NGJA). The secrecy was indeed important due to safety reasons. The officials confirmed that the stone belongs to Mr. Gamage because it was found in his private property. Since its discovery was nothing but a stroke of serendipity, it received the name ‘Serendipity Stone’.
A World Record
The stone has dimensions of 100 cm in length, 72cm in width & 50cms in height. Its voluminous size makes it the biggest ever find of its kind. If you’re wondering, it is approximately 2.5 million carats, having a value between $72 million and $100 million.
Blue Sapphire is the national gemstone of Sri Lanka. And the area where this biggest sapphire stone was found is called Ratnapura. In Sinhalese, the age old Sri Lankan language, Ratna means Gem and pura means town or city. The area, Ratnapura, has a reputation of holding many large sapphire deposits in Sri Lanka. This time, it truly lived up to its name.
The Xinhua news agency later reported that the Gubelin Gem Lab in Switzerland certified Serendipity as the largest star sapphire cluster ever to be discovered, earning a place for itself in the Guinness Book.
The true value of the stone is yet to be known. It’s only after an intense analysis and careful dismantling of this pale blue stone is done that we will really know how many and how large truly clear gems it is hiding though BBC has reported its value to be over a 100 million dollars. As per some news sources, Serendipity Stone will probably be auctioned in Britain and only then we’ll come to know its true worth.
What would you do if you found such a thing in your own backyard?
Your Own Serendipity
If you want a piece of Serendipity, then there’s no telling how long you need to wait. However, you can explore a wide variety of natural & lab-created sapphires at GemsNY. There’s no wait and you can get your sapphire jewelry in a jiffy.
