Famously Known

The biggest rough dia­mond ever dis­covered is called Cul­l­in­an. Found in 1905 by the work­ers of Premi­er Dia­mond Min­ing Com­pany, it was as big as a man’s fist and weighed 3106 car­ats. Today, it would have been priced at 7.5 bil­lion USD. Be­cause the stone was cracked with­in, it was im­possible to cut and pol­ish as a whole. In­stead, it was split in­to sev­er­al parts: two large, sev­en me­di­um-sized, and about a hun­dred small dia­monds.

An­oth­er fam­ous dia­mond worth not­ing is the Cen­ten­ary dia­mond, found by the same min­ing com­pany in the 1988. The dia­mond's ori­gin­al weight was 599 car­ats, but its ir­reg­u­lar shape made pro­cessing the stone very dif­fi­cult. Mas­ter gem cut­ters, with par­tic­u­lar ex­pert­ise in dia­mond cut­ting, were in­volved in the Cen­ten­ary’s pro­cessing. They stud­ied the stone for three years just to pre­pare for the cut­ting. The Cen­ten­ary cut­ting was fin­ished in 1991, pro­du­cing a 273.8-car­at dia­mond.

Found in 56 B.C., the Koh-i-Noor dia­mond is one of the most an­cient dia­monds known. Nowadays, it is a part of a col­lec­tion stored at the Tower of Lon­don. After be­ing cut the first time, the dia­mond weighed more than 600 car­ats. After the second cut, though, its weight was re­duced to only 186.1 car­ats. The story of the Koh-i-Noor dia­mond is the story of nu­mer­ous be­tray­als and treas­ons, de­cep­tions and lies, and even blood­sheds and murders. Every­one who saw this in­cred­ible stone was will­ing to give his or her life to pos­sess it. The Koh-i-Noor is ex­tremely beau­ti­ful in­deed; only a few stones have sim­il­ar fine­ness and light play qual­it­ies.

An­oth­er fam­ous dia­mond is the Or­lov dia­mond (some­times spelled Or­loff). It is the world's third largest cut dia­mond. Or­lov’s his­tory began in the 17th cen­tury, when it was dis­covered in In­dia. The ori­gin­al stone weighed 400 car­ats. It lost more than half its size when it was cut, fi­nally weigh­ing only 189.62 car­ats. Le­gend says that the stone ori­gin­ally be­longed to Hindu priests and dec­or­ated the head of the Moon god statue kept in their temple. The god Vish­nu once came to the priests and com­manded them to cher­ish the dia­mond as if it was the apple of their eye. The god also said that any­one who dared to steal the stone would be doomed to dis­ease and mis­for­tune. It is be­lieved that, after ruler Aur­ang­zeba ordered the de­struc­tion of nu­mer­ous Hindu temples, the Or­lov dia­mond star­ted to bring mis­for­tune to its keep­ers. The stone was con­sidered lost for a long time, un­til the 18th cen­tury. It re­appeared again in the 1784 dec­or­at­ing the Rus­si­an em­per­or’s scepter, which is now kept at the Dia­mond Fund of the Mo­scow Krem­lin.