Kasikci (Spoonmaker’s) Diamond Kaşıkcı Elması

Kasikci (Spoonmaker's) Diamond

The treasury of Topkapi Palace is full of precious things, but two of them are the more renowned ones: Topkapi Dagger and Kasikci Elmasi (Spoonmaker's Diamond). I will tell you the story of the second one.

Kasikci Elmasi, a 86-carat pear-shaped diamond, is the most valuable single gem in the Palace. There are two interesting theories about its origin.

1) According to an Ottoman royal historian, Rashid, a poor man found a diamond in a garbage dump in Istanbul in 1699. Nobody knows how come the diamond was there. Anyway, the poor man bartered it to a spoonmaker for 3 wooden spoons.

Then the spoonmaker sold it to a jeweler for 10 silver coins. The jeweler told about the diamond to one of his colleagues and they quarrelled after it was clear that it worths a fortune. They came to an agreement to sell it to a third jeweler for a bag of golds for each one of them.

The third jeweler was not so lucky as Grand Vizier Ahmed Pasha heard about the gem and confiscated it. Then Sultan Mehmed IV learned about the affair and he eventually took the possession of the diamond. Did he pay anything? Nobody knows.

2) There is another (and probably more reliable) story. According to Victor Argenzio, Maharajah of Madras in India sold the diamond to a French officer, named Picot, in 1774. He has been robbed by thieves and the diamond got lost for a long while.

A theory suggests that a gem which is bought by Casanova in an auction was actually Picot Diamond. It finally ended up on the hands of Napoleon's mother, Letizia Ramolino. She sold it to help his son, who was a prisoner in Elba, in 1815 and it is bought by Tepedelenli Ali Pasha for 150.000 gold coins. Pasha was killed in a revolt and his treasury was confiscated by Sultan Mahmud II. That's how it reached to the Sublime Porte.