Celestine

Item Description

A gorgeous and very aesthetic blue Celestine cluster from an obscure locality in Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is not a country one thinks of for good Celestine crystals, however, the locality is moderately populated with specimens on Mindat and this one is better than most of those presented there! This handsome piece consists of a half a dozen, nearly sky-blue super lustrous, broad, wedge-shaped terminated crystals that are translucent to somewhat transparent. The crystals are all sharply formed with some growth hillocks and/or small parallel growth faces on their surfaces that make them just scintillate with any incident light! The largest, tapered, wedge-shaped crystal measures 3.5 cm across. It is a colorful piece with great presentation. When Kurt bought this for the collection, he labelled it as part of the old USSR, by way of dating it before 1991. Note that while we have seen more specimens coming from here throughout the mid to late 1990s, they all had thin blades and crystals to 1 cm. At most. I handled hundreds of specimens from this locality in the mid to late 1990s and never had anything close to a specimen with this robust, huge crystal form. This is surely an older, obscure find. It is the first example I have seen for sale of such size from this locale.