He bought a sea!

Can you buy the sea?!

Well, that’s just what a Russian prince did – or almost that!

Prince Urussoff, a Russian nobleman, came from a family which believed in many superstitions – like most of us! One of his family beliefs was that the loss of a wedding ring would soon cause the loss of the bride herself. Now this would not have bothered the Prince at all, if his beautiful young bride hadn’t lost her ring soon after their marriage. And what was worse, she dropped it by mistake into the Black Sea while they were crossing it!

Prince Urussoff definitely didn’t want to lose his wife, but how could he find a ring in a huge expanse of water like the Black Sea?

So he did the only thing he could. He bought all the land that lay on all sides of the Black Sea from hundreds of owners for about the equivalent ten million dollars! He reasoned that if he owned the entire shore around the expanse of water, then he owned the sea too – and all that lay at the bottom, including the ring! And if he still owned it, he couldn’t have lost it – though he couldn’t put his finger in it!

When the Prince died, his heirs did not need to own the ring anymore. So they sold all the land around the Black Sea that Prince Urussoff had bought – for twice as much!