Missing wallet
The special 20 franc note. Pjeter Marku/Twitter

KEY POINTS

  • It took 10 years for Kosovo-born Pjeter Marku to be reunited with his wallet.
  • He says that the Swiss are "really honest."

A man who lost his wallet 10 years ago has been reunited with it and its contents - including a memento that he had saved since 1989.

Kosovo-born Pjeter Marku lost his wallet in 2007 while working on a construction site of a postal office in Härkingen, Switzerland. The wallet contained 500 Swiss francs (£377) as well as important identification papers when it was mislaid.

Despite help from his colleagues he was unable to locate the item and gave up all hope of ever seeing it again. Aside from the missing items and money, there was one thing he was particularly upset about - a missing 20 franc bill.

Marku, a 46-year-old labourer, arrived to Switzerland following the fall of the eastern bloc in the late eighties with only a 20 franc note. He held onto the note without ever spending it, and over time, it became a reminder with significant sentimental value to him.

10 years later the wallet was eventually found by a passer-by and handed into the postal office where it was lost.

According to 20 minutes, the postal office then rang him up to inform him the good news. He intially disbelieved them and told them he already had his.

When he went to pick it up he discovered that it still contained the missing cash and cards - and even more importantly the special banknote which he had saved since 1989.

"The Swiss really are honest people," he told the paper.

Pjeter is not the only person to have been recently handed back a long-time missing item. An elderly motorist in Germany finally got back a car that he had misplaced at a carpark in Cologne in 1997. Unfortunately for him, the car had to be destroyed due to accumulation of rust.