Adam lived in a small village in the south of Poland near to the big city of Krakow. Adam’s favourite part of the day was dinner time. Not because his mother made the best food in the whole world, but because, at dinner time, the whole family would sit around the television and watch the news. No school lesson could compare to the stories Adam watched on the news: exotic looking people from different cultures, natural disasters in countries he had never visited and insights into the coolest celebrities and their extraordinary lives. It was one such story that changed Adam’s life forever ...

One evening, just before harvest, the family was sitting round enjoying steaming bowls of chicken soup with homemade macaroni when the news began. The top story was about a mysterious robbery from Wawel Castle in the nearby city of Krakow. During the night, thieves had snuck in and taken the treasure from Smok’s lair!

Everybody in Poland knows the story of Smok the Dragon who lived in Wawel Castle many hundreds of years ago. Smok lived in the caves beneath the castle and used to eat the King’s cattle. The King offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to the man who could slay the mighty dragon. Many brave knights and noblemen tried and failed, but in the end it was a simple cobbler who had slain the mighty dragon.

As every school girl and boy knows, dragons sleep on a bed of gold treasure. Smok’s lair had such a bed of gold, and when the dragon was slain, the King did not move the gold because he wanted other dragons to think that Smok still lived in Wawel Castle. ‘That way,’ the King had exclaimed, ‘I will never be bothered by dragons again!’

And so the gold coins stayed in the dragon’s lair for hundreds of years, each new king believing that the gold brought good luck to his people.