19 Priceless Things Destroyed By Infuriating Idiocy

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Look, accidents happen, we get that. You trip, you break something, you fix it or replace it, no big deal. But imagine if your bumbled into something truly consequential, historically important, and priceless. That's what happened to these poor saps, whose faces are now probably twisted into a permanent cringe.

There's literally no living these down.

19

In 2014, a French museum guard who needed a break sat down on a nearby folding chair. It was a 200-year-old chair used by Napoleon himself. Was, becau

18

At the Milan city council's 2013 Christmas party, one guest got kind of careless. I Roberto Cassago Opening a wine bottle, council official Roberto Ca

17

In 2013, when a Belizean construction company needed limestone to build a road, they helped themselves to a nearby Mayan temple. CAT Archaeologists sa

16

In 2002, the TSA decided that famous Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman's custom Steinway grand piano was probably a bomb, because its glue smelled like

15

In the 18th century, Shakespeare's last home drew hordes of tourists, driving its owner crazy. A 1737 sketch of the house One of the biggest attractio

14

Yorkshire's Brimham Rocks formed over 320 million years. Before After Until 2019, when some teenagers goofing off ended up pushing one of the boulders

13

Churchill hated his official 80th birthday portrait because it showed him as he was (not as he wanted to be), and he kept it in his cellar. Soon after

12

A selfie attempt ruined two Portuguese national monuments. O T SOiw In 2016, a man climbed up on the 126-year-old statue of King Sebastian at the entr

11

In 2012, Russian tycoon Dmitry Stroskin ordered an outhouse on the estate of his French chateau demolished while he was in Russia. When he came back,

10

The developers of the cryptocurrency Ether tried to protect it from mass-scale theft with a patch. But the patch was buggy, and in 2017, one developer

9

War photographer Robert Capa was with the U.S. troops on D-Day, and took 106 up-close pictures of the battle. He handed the negatives to Life magazine

8

For 300 years, the Tree of Tenere was the world's most isolated tree, with 250 miles of unbroken desert around it in every direction. It even appeared

7

In 2012, seven paintings by artists like Picasso, Monet, and Matisse were stolen from a Rotterdam gallery. Some of the stolen paintings The thieves co

6

When a da Vinci sketch was found in 1998 among drawings by Italian artist Stefano della Bella, restorers got to work on it. (A portrait of da Vinci, n

5

In 2013, when contractors at the Indian Museum in Kolkata broke a priceless lion sculpture from 250 B.C., the museum kind of just shrugged. They tried

4

In 2010, an adult and a minor went paintballing on a sacred Native American site. Paintball splatter T Petroglyph They splattered paint all over the s

3

In 2015, a Taipei exhibition of super-valuable artwork let visitors get very close to the art. The hole At one point, a wandering kid slipped, fell, a

2

In 2019, a priest from the Basque town of Estella asked a local arts and crafts teacher to restore a 500-year-old wooden carving. It sounds like a sit