About

Hey — thanks for visiting this page! Since you landed here, I’m guessing you’d like to learn a bit more about PRONIK SPECIMENS and its founder, so here you go!

My name is Prodromos, and although I’ve studied and enjoy geology, collecting specimens — minerals, rocks, and fossils — has always felt like the highlight of a day out in the field. The mineral collecting bug bit me quite young but the “disease” remained dormant for many years. My first mineral encounter was with a pyrite specimen that I discovered as a child forgotten inside a drawer at my family home. It was by far the most beautiful and valuable object that I have ever seen in my life. I treasured it greatly and had it displayed in a prominent position on my desk for many years. Sometime later, I learned that this specimen had been purchased by my sister from a museum’s gift shop. She didn’t buy it because she liked it particularly, but rather because all of her peers were taking some sort of souvenir from the museum and she didn’t want to be left out.

Years passed without much interaction with minerals — the Greek countryside I was growing up at didn’t have any particular interest in rocks or minerals (it seemed people there were only focused on their crops and if weather will allow for a good year’s harvest). There was only one time that my father brought home one of those pre-assembled and boxed mineral collections containing 15 specimens, cut in cubes, and titled “Minerals and Rocks of Greece”. Another instance, that I vividly remember, was the circulation of a kids magazine for minerals where each issue was accompanied by a small specimen from somewhere around the world (of course, according to the principles of marketing, the first issue’s specimen was the bottled gold flakes). This really got me hooked but unfortunately the increasing prices of the magazine and the amount of issues wouldn’t allow me to complete the entire collection.

More years have passed and it was time for me to go to university. I enrolled for a degree in geology and a first-semester mineralogy course produced the spark that started my daily since then love affair with minerals! My graduate-level studies also revolved around mineral collecting. During that time, I employed geophysics to explore for mineral pockets in the Swiss Alps (thesis title: “Coupling georadar field data with numerical modeling to increase the effectiveness in the exploration of crystallized mineral cavities”).

From a mineral collecting standpoint, I can’t say that I have a particular focus. Some specimens are in my collection because they are associated with a cool story. Some because they were the subject of my research. While others because they are simply stunning. That being said, you can find in my collection a piece of plain limestone standing next to a transparent, highly lustrous and sharply terminated imperial topaz on matrix. But who knows, maybe with time it will eventually get a more focused character — although I’m least worried about my collection finding a theme!

The idea of offering mineral specimens for purchase to collectors started floating around sometime during the course of my undergraduate studies. Frequent university field trips to mines and solo prospecting hikes resulted in such an influx of specimens that my small apartment-space was severely struggling to cope with displaying everything. As more and more specimens kept coming in, lots of them had to go into shoeboxes for storage. But that didn’t feel right — those small treasures from the Earth were simply too beautiful to be stored in shoeboxes. Instead, they ought to be displayed and admired at all times. Well, what if they could be shared with other like-minded people who could accommodate for them to be marvelled in their own collections? Yes, that felt like a more fitting destiny! In this sense, PRONIK SPECIMENS mineral dealership materialized for the first time as an entity on 7th Sep 2017 when an account was created on e-rocks and the first sale happened about a month later on 9th Oct 2017. PRONIK SPECIMENS existed online here and there (e.g. Instagram, Facebook, ebay, e-rocks) but it didn’t have any official place of living. Until 1st Aug 2023 when this website was created and went online.

Thanks for reading through and for your interest to learn a bit more about PRONIK SPECIMENS and myself. Feel free to reach out as it’s always a pleasure to talk rocks!

Cheers and Glückauf!
Prodromos Nikolaidis