This Monday will go down in history as the day when the most expensive Moomin mug was sold on the Finnish auction site Huuto.net.

The collector's item – a Fazer themed Moomin mug from 2004 manufactured in only 400 items – was sold for 5 000 euros today to a buyer in Espoo, Finland.

Thomas Riska, the seller, is a collector of the wildly popular Moomin mugs.

– I have nearly 100 mugs at home, he says.

He put this particular mug up for auction to finance a new summer cottage. His mug is number 232 in the collection.

Earlier this year a Finnish national sold the same Moomin mug (number 400) for 4 000 euros.

– She sent a private message on the auction site telling me that she's now off to Australia.

For Thomas Riska this Monday morning was an exciting one:

– There were four bidder competing with each other this morning.

The starting price for the mug was 50 euros, and this week end he saw the price rise to 4 000 euros.

The Moomins are the central characters in a series of books, and a comic strip by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson.

The Moomin mugs are manufactured by the Finnish ceramics brand Arabia and is a series of collectable mugs with characters from the Moomin tales.

Read full story in Swedish here: