CELESTINE

ABOUT THE SPECIMEN In the small world of Turkmen minerals, celestine reigns supreme! Samples like this, showing colorless, glassy, tabular crystals on a matrix colored red by hematite were unearthed in the 1990’s, and now rare on the open market. Here the coverage of crystals, including some on the backside, as well as their elegant form makes this a beautiful cabinet addition. All around in great condition, with some non-detracting edge wear.   VIDEO   MORE INFO Beineu-Kyr sits roughly 20 km south of Gökdepe village in the fold-and-thrust terrain of the south Tuarkyr range, a Mesozoic sedimentary sequence in which evaporite-associated strontium sulfate mineralization is geologically unsurprising - celestine commonly precipitates from evaporitic brines where strontium is fractionated out of calcium sulfate during diagenesis. The locality produced geodes lined with colorless to pale blue prismatic crystals overgrowing a base of red celestine whose color derives from disseminated hematite inclusions - the two-toned combination on a single specimen being the defining visual signature of the site. Blue coloration in the upper crystals is an intrinsic structural feature related to lattice defects rather than a chromophoric impurity. Material reached Western collections almost exclusively through a narrow window in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, roughly 1988–1993, when similar Central Asian localities briefly opened to outside dealers; examples with Fersman Museum provenance from Moscow confirm the deposit was known to Soviet mineralogists considerably earlier. No documented production has followed, making Beineu-Kyr celestine genuinely fixed in supply - a locality that receives far less attention than its quality warrants simply because so few collectors have encountered it.