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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 72, 12 August 1912, Page 4

WHERE TREASURE ACCUMULATES. An enormous amount of treasure is lying idle in Mesopotamia if the Turkish officials are to be. believed. A correspondent of the London Dally Chronicle interviewed Ismail Hakki Bey Babanzadeb, the deputy for Bagdad, a few weeks ago, and was told that an effort was being made to secure an investigation regarding the stories of gold and jewels at certain sacred shrines. During more than a thousand years pilgrims had been making rich gifts to the mosques and the priests and the wealth had been allowed to accumulate, Kerbelt and Nedjcf, which arc well-known places of pilgrimage, possess ancient objects of art of almost inestimable value. The gems of Kerbela alone have been valued at £30,000,000, and there is reason to believe that the estimate is not excessive. In one of the mausoleums of the town is a sword which a former Persian Shah tried unsuccessfully to buy. His offer of about £SOOO was rejected, on the score that the weapon was sacred and could not be sold. Enormous quantities of priceless curtains, carpets and shawls are gathered at Kerbela, and every year at least 200,000 pilgrims add to the riches of the mosques. But the town, which has about 60,000 inhabitants, does not possess a secondary school or a hospital. Hakki Bey has small reverence for the musty traditions of the past, and he would like to see the ancient treasures carried to London and Paris, there to be sold to the wealthy collectors of Europe and America. The proceeds could be used to meet the urgent needs of tlte Ottoman Empire in the matter of railways, schools, roads and administrative reforms. Some of the money, says the Turk, should be handed to Sir William Willcocks, the . famous British engineer, who is proceeding with,his plans for the irrigation of Mesopotamia in the face of extraordinary difficulties. But the ordinary Moslem doubtless would be prepared to defend the storehouses of the mosques with his life.