The mystery of Russia’s “eighth wonder of the world”
With its luminous and fragile nature, amber has been treated with reverence by many and even protected by Prussian law since the 13th century.
The Amber Room, a series of panels crafted from six tonnes of amber, mounted on gold-leaf walls, and decorated with mosaics and mirrors, is an exemplary demonstration of the material’s beauty designed for royalty in Prussia and Russia.
But it is also shrouded in mystery.
The room was originally designed in the early 18th century for King Frederick I of Prussia, before it was gifted to Russian Tsar Peter the Great. When it was eventually moved to the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg, the panels were incorporated into a larger room decorated with candelabra, mosaics, gilded figures, and even more amber. The Baroque chamber became known as the “eighth wonder of the world”.
Following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, the Amber Room was dismantled and moved to Königsberg castle in the German state of Prussia. Königsberg was a “transfer base for [looted] cultural objects, which would be stored in the city for further transportation to other parts of Germany”, says Anatoly Valuev of the Kaliningrad History and Arts Museum.
However, when the Red Army seized the city in 1945, the Amber Room could not be found.
Though some thought fire had destroyed it, “no traces of burning amber were found,” said Valuev. “And it was assumed the room survived after all, and it was hidden in the castle’s basement or it was taken somewhere else.”
Despite the belief it was hidden somewhere, two separate investigations conducted in 1946 and the 2000’s turned up nothing. Searching through hundreds of locations around the city and in the town’s castle ruins, the soviet specialists found artworks and jewellery hidden in the castle basement. But no sign of the Amber Room.
As hopes of finding the chamber started to die, a change of tack was needed. In 1979, the former USSR began reconstruction of the room with guidance from two remaining original items: a single box of relics and 86 black-and-white photos of the space taken just prior to World War Two.
Though the reconstruction took 23 years, the recreated Amber Room has been on display at Catherine Palace in the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum and Heritage Site in St Petersburg since 2003, bringing the glowing orange and gold resin to life once again.