Ten years ago, newly wed John and his wife from the United Kingdom were visiting Zadar, a town on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, where they stumbled upon a quaint museum housing a premium collection of Roman glassware collected from various archeological sites across the region. The couple were mesmerized by the fact that you not only can admire the complete ancient glass artefacts, but you can also purchase original souvenirs made the old-fashioned way to take home with you. They picked up two Roman glasses and, as sad as things get over the years, the glasses got chipped and broken.

That brings us to just before this Christmas when John thought of an excellent present to his beloved wife: the wine glasses from the same tiny shop in Croatia. What he didn’t think of was the crusade that he would have to endure and the collaborators he would get on the way.

More info: Twitter

This year has been challenging for everyone and even Christmas was meant to be different

Image credits: John Bull

This story started 10 years ago in a tiny museum dedicated to nothing else but glassware

Image credits: John Bull

John obviously had to find a way to hide the plan from his all-seeing wife

As in all exciting stories, there always is a secret helper involved

The second hero of the story devoted his time to go to the museum in person

Image credits: John Bull

The current pandemic didn’t speed up the process at all

But to everyone’s relief, the glasses made it just before Christmas

Everything started with John’s determination to surprise his wife for Christmas and order some new glassware. What he didn’t expect was that it would be quite complicated to get in touch with the museum as it’s not only a relatively small institution, but also it has no English translation on its website, nor a way to purchase the souvenir stock online. That didn’t put John off and he managed to find the contacts of the elusive museum’s souvenir store.

What he needed then was to find a Croatian speaker on Twitter that could help him in his quest and, of course, without his wife realizing what was actually going on. So Dulijano from Zagreb came into the picture and offered to call the store and find out what the deal was. Turned out that it had no means of accepting payments online or via the phone and offered onsite sales during opening hours only. As Dulijano lives on the other side of the country, he got his friend Patrik in Zadar to go to the museum’s store before it closed, snap photos of the items available, and send them to Dulijano back in Zagreb, who then forwarded them to John in the UK. To his great surprise, after John selected the items, Dulijano’s friend purchased the glasses with his own money right the next day and said to worry about the payment later.

And even the unknown hero was identified at the end

Despite all the obvious pressure of the pandemic and the daily stress, Patrik packed the glasses and sent them off to the UK. The waiting game commenced as the borders had become more complicated for the regular postage to flow normally as a result of the pandemic, and respective postal services were more sluggish due to an obviously busy festive season. And as just John was losing his last hope that the present would get to his wife on time, it actually arrived on the 23rd of December with the glasses “all perfectly intact because of loving care in which they were packed.”

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John also expressed his gratitude to the two dedicated men in Croatia and regained belief in the good old internet community that proved to help their fellow users.

His post on Twitter gained 5.9K likes and was re-shared more than 1.6K times.

Twitter users were touched and uplifted by the wholesome story

Image credits: catfind

Image credits: WatersCompany

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