(FORTUNE Magazine) – Not that she was the sort to have minded, but Mother Teresa was shortchanged when she won the Nobel Prize in 1979. The Nobel Foundation gave her only 800,000 kronor, equal to about $190,000. But this year, laureates John Hume and David Trimble get to split 7.6 million kronor, or a little over $1 million. Factoring out inflation, the real value of the prize more than doubled in less than 20 years.

FORTUNE called Ake Alteus, deputy executive director of the foundation, to find out why. Turns out, the prize money increased because the foundation lucked out. Alteus explains that from 1987 to 1990, the organization owned some commercial real estate in Sweden, during which time the value of the property skyrocketed. "It was very fortunate," he says. "We sold in March 1990, Saddam Hussein entered Kuwait in August, and the financial crisis hit in September."

The 1990 gain enabled the Nobel people to boost prize amounts so that they're now inflation-adjusted equivalents of the original 1901 prize, which had slowly decreased in real value over the years. So have any past Nobel laureates called to complain that they were stiffed? Says Alteus: "I haven't heard of that...."

--Eryn Brown