Izverna Cave in the Mehedinti Mountains is not only a place visited by a lot of tourists, but one that also welcomes a lot of treasure hunters every year. It is said that this cave hides the Serbian thesaurus in Milan Obrenovici’s and Mihail’s time, the two princes who were fighting for the throne in the second half of the twentieth century. Mihail was the one who took the throne, so he tried to take the national thesaurus to Poland, where he would have lived in exile for some time. However, the prince finally decided to hide the treasure in Romania, which is how the eighty burden carts got to Izverna Cave.
A number of people made a special safe place in the cave, where the prince could hide his treasure without anyone else ever finding it again. There are locals who still remember the legend connected to this treasure and to its location. The mouth of the cave or the entrance was built in such a way that only a cart pulled by oxen could pass through it. Then, the main gallery is about six meters wide and ten meters tall. This is where you can see the spring which flows under the western wall. The soldiers dug a place somewhere down and made four extra rooms. Most of the treasure, including the prince’s seals, was buried in the last room. They let two carts in the second room, a lot of rock and soil in the third and, last but not least, they buried the witnesses int he first room they built, over whom they threw stones and soil.
The spring was guided to the four rooms, eventually flooding them. The cave is full of lakes tourists swim in either for fun or looking for treasures and many of them get out of the cave with a skull in their hands or with a golden coin, telling the locals that there is a treasure somewhere around there. However, not all tourists survive their expeditions and this is mainly because the cave has its own special traps. There were cases in which a part of the rock simply fell off, the water flooding it and throwing the tourists away. Some people survived and told everyone that they could feel something dragging them to the sides and the only thing they could see was their companions being dragged into an underground room.
Some say that all these treasures were placed by the workers who built the four rooms. It is also said that there is a woman who saw the treasure, but who has been paralyzed ever since. She went with her friends to the cave when she was ten and she swam in the lakes in the cave. However, the draft took her and carried her to underground galleries. Her friends thought she had died, but she came out of the cave two days later, crawling out and stunned by what she had seen. This may seem like a very possible story, but there are also a lot of people who are skeptical about it.
