Reveal of the new Romanéchite mineral collecting locality near Királyszentistván, Veszprém Co., Hungary

Intro - The year of "the virus" and the first announcement

So at this time we’ve written 2020; the (first) year of the „virus”. It was a very weird and unusual time for a lot of reasons. First off, we barely had any mineral shows that calendar year not just in Hungary but everywhere else around the world. Secondly and consequently some collectors had more possibilities to go back to old localities which they couldn’t explore as much as they wanted or to work on finding new ones. Well, luckily in this case the latter happened.

In June/2020 the Hungarian mineral collecting community got news from two enthusiastic and long-time mineral collectors, Tamás Németh and Attila Kovács that they have found a very interesting form of an uncommon barium bearing manganese oxide which has been determined by the University of Miskolc as Romanéchite. The two of them started to exploit the site in the spring 2020 and worked relentlessly throughout months to collect a sizeable amount of specimens. The best quality pieces are big, coral or tree-shaped black Romanéchite aggregates and often the aesthetics are lifted by the brownish/reddish yellow balls of Göethite. At times the dolomite gravel has been "captured" and cemented together by the Romanéchite. The biggest specimen I’ve seen a video about was somewhere between 30-35 cm but that size is very rare because the country rock is heavily cracked and even working with utmost care the shearing of the dolomite and shattering of the Romanéchite is unavoidable. Geologically a fault created brecciated cavities in the Triassic dolomite host rock and other sediments (sand, clay) into which hydrothermal fluids brought this very interesting mineralization. The sediments sneaked into the cavities and filled them up therefore a lot of nice specimens remained intact like THIS wonderful and quite big (ex. Rockaholik collection, now being in a private collection).

Public reveal of the locality

The beforementioned two fellow collectors were successful to hold the information of the locality in secret but they announced in the late summer that on the 23rd of October 2020 they will lead every interested rockhound to the site and anyone can dig their own specimens. And this is exactly what happened. We gathered at the house of one of the original Romanéchite collectors’ house where a wide spectrum of collector generations presented itself. We could get to know new faces, with some of them we already „knew” eachother from social media platforms (what an interesting age to live in!) and we had good chats and snacks until our departure. Eventually the whole crew formed up and the convoy has been led to siege the yet new locality near Királyszentistván, Veszprém County, Hungary.

Currently the collecting site is a periodically exploited sand mine which fortunately (or unfortunately) does not affect the Romanéchite bearing Dolomitic part of the quarry. In the sand walls there's no mineralization found yet so we set out to have a crack on the Dolomite during this amazing, very shiny day and we started the rockhounding on the slightly wet wall.

Collecting

I was very lucky to hit a small pocket almost right away which was filled with a very characteristic reddish orange colored sand. Interestingly the sand or clay in the pockets probably contain different amount and oxidation stage of iron that’s why they differ in color. This color sometimes represents itself on the specimen as well, so the Göethite’s color can range from bright yellow to orange through red and also slightly greenish yellow. See reddish orange colored Göethite on the below specimen (which also belongs to a private collection now).

Unfortunately the pocket was a small one and there was not much room to form those highly desired coral-shaped formations instead the Romanéchite filled the cracks and created layers and short dendritic shapes on the surface of the dolomite. Here’s a photo of part of the pocket in situ where you can see the sand layer between the dolomite:

I took out half a flat of mediocre to bad quality specimens from that pocket but there were luckier collectors. One of them struck into a very interesting pocket which was filled with big and truely black Romanéchites without any iron staining. The collecting went on for a few hours, and everyone dug their own little foxholes enthusiastically no matter of age. Unfortunately I had limited time to collect so I left before sunset but the thrill and the whole experience with all the other rockhounds made that day truely worthwhile and wonderful and made me commit to come back at another time as well…

-end of Part 1...