This tale is built around a legend often told in northern Tanzania. The young herder and his grandfather are imagined. The fire, the blue stones and the discovery of tanzanite in 1967 are the heart of a story that is still told today.
On the dry plains below Kilimanjaro, the grass grows tall and golden, and the great white mountain floats above the clouds like something from a dream. A boy named Lemayian walked those plains every day with his family's cattle, from sunrise until the shadows grew long.
One evening, the sky turned strange. Black clouds rolled in over the hills of Merelani, heavy and low. Thunder shook the ground. And then a bolt of lightning struck the dry grass, and the hillside caught fire.
Lemayian ran. He drove the cattle away from the flames, his heart pounding, and watched from far off as the fire swept across the hill and burned itself out in the dark.
Blue Stones in the Ashes
In the morning, the hill was black and still smoking in places. Lemayian walked back slowly with his cattle, kicking through the warm ashes, looking for anything that had survived.
That's when he saw it. Something on the ground was glowing blue.
He crouched down. Scattered across the burned earth were small crystals. He had seen stones like them before on this hill: dull, brownish, nothing anyone wanted. But now, after the fire, they had changed. They were blue. Not the blue of the sky or the blue of water, but a deep, glowing violet-blue, like the sky in the last minutes after sunset.
He gathered a handful and ran home.
What the Fire Knew
His grandfather turned the stones over in the light of the cooking fire for a long time.
"The sky came down to the hill last night," the old man said at last. "And it left a little of its color behind."
"Are they worth anything, Grandfather?"
The old man smiled and closed the boy's fingers around the stones. "Everything the sky gives is worth something. But I think the people who come from far away will want these more than we do."
The World Finds Out
He was right. The legend says it was herders like Lemayian who first noticed the blue crystals in the Merelani Hills. In 1967, a prospector named Manuel de Souza, searching the hills for rubies and other gems, came across the strange blue stones and set out to find out what they were.
Scientists studied them and found something astonishing. The stone was a blue form of a mineral called zoisite, and nobody had ever found it anywhere else on earth. Not in Africa, not in Asia, not anywhere. Only here, in a small patch of hills in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.
The famous jeweler Tiffany & Co. fell in love with it and, in 1968, gave it a name to honor the country where it was found: tanzanite. They told the world it was so rare that you could find it in only two places: in Tanzania, and at Tiffany's.
A Stone That Changes With the Light
Years later, Lemayian was an old man himself, with grandchildren of his own. One of them held a cut tanzanite up to the light and turned it, and it flashed blue, then violet, then a hint of deep red.
"It keeps changing," the child said.
"Of course it does," said Lemayian. "It was made by fire and by sky. It remembers both."
The Legend and the Truth
Tanzanite was discovered in 1967 in the Merelani Hills of northern Tanzania, near Mount Kilimanjaro, and is still found commercially in only this one small area. A popular legend tells that Maasai herders first noticed the blue crystals after a lightning-sparked grass fire, because heat turns the stone's natural brownish crystals violet-blue. The prospector Manuel de Souza is usually credited with bringing the stones to the attention of the gem world, and Tiffany & Co. named and introduced tanzanite in 1968.
Today, nearly all tanzanite is gently heated, exactly as the fire in the legend did, to bring out its blue. In 2002 it became a December birthstone. And because its only source is one small corner of the world, many people believe it may one day become far rarer than it is today.
🛍️ Find Your Piece of the Sky
Explore our tanzanite jewelry at 322 Royal Street or online. Want to know what to look for? Read our Tanzanite Jewelry Guide.
