amorphous
Moldavite
- Also known as
- vltavinBohemian tektite
- Crystal system
- amorphous
- Hardness
- 5.5–7 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- vitreous
- Colour
- Bottle green to olive
- Where it forms
- By meteorite impact. About fifteen million years ago an object struck what is now the Nordlinger Ries in Germany, melted the surface rock, and threw droplets of it hundreds of kilometres east, where they cooled in flight and fell across Bohemia and Moravia. The sculpted surface is etching by groundwater since.
- Chiefly from
- Bohemia and Moravia, Czech Republic
Why it is that colour
Iron in the melted terrestrial rock. The colour is that of ordinary green glass, for ordinary green-glass reasons.
Safety
Safe to handle. It is glass, and sharp if broken.
Where it comes from
A single small region, and the deposits are genuinely finite and close to worked out. The 2021 price surge produced a flood of counterfeits — green bottle glass, moulded and etched — and by several dealer estimates the majority of moldavite sold online during that period was fake. Czech collecting is now restricted and unlicensed digging is illegal.
Historical use
Named after the Moldau, the German name for the Vltava river. Faceted moldavite was popular in Czech jewellery from the nineteenth century.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Moldavite has been known since the eighteenth century and used in Czech jewellery, including a piece given to Queen Elizabeth II. Claims of Palaeolithic amulet use exist and are thinly evidenced. Its current reputation as an intense stone of transformation, and the widespread claim that it produces an overwhelming physical reaction, is an internet phenomenon that surged dramatically on social media in 2021, with prices rising several hundred per cent in months.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Sold as this, but not
Worth knowing
Moldavite is the best-documented case of an internet-era attribution, because it happened recently enough to watch. The stone had a steady, modest market for two centuries. In 2021 it went viral, and within months prices had multiplied, supply had been exhausted, and the market had filled with green glass.
The physical facts are genuinely remarkable and need no help. This is terrestrial rock that was melted by an impact, thrown through the upper atmosphere, and rained down over central Europe as cooling droplets fifteen million years ago. It comes from one small area, there is not much of it, and there will not be more.
That is the stone. The rest arrived in 2021.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.