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The
Amber Room: The
'room' was an entire interior of magnificently
carved pieces of amber and was given to Tsar Peter
the Great in 1716 by Friedrick Wilhelm of Prussia
to consolidate an alliance, it was placed in the
imperial palace at Tsarskoye Selo about 25 km south
of the City of St Petersburg. The building, known
as the Catherine Palace was the Tsar's summer
residence and is in the suburb of Pushkin. The room
remained in the Palace for some two hundred years.
Weighing in at about six tons it was/is the largest
artwork ever constructed from amber. It must have
been a magnificent sight, for the warm honey tones
of the amber would have glowed on account of them
being backed with gold leaf to catch and magnify
the light. The room took a dedicated team of
craftsmen some ten years to create and was known as
the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was the last
residence of Tsar Nicholas II.
Below:
the palace today as seen from the park
side. The
Tragedy: You
can't see the Amber Room today, as it was stolen by
the NAZIs during 1941, despite Russian attempts to
disguise it... by wallpapering over it. (10/10 for
effort, but that one was doomed to failure.) It's a
bit hard to hide several tons of room under
paper... Prussian Count Sommes Laubach, then an
'Art Protection Officer' decided that the Amber
Room should be taken back to Germany for "safety",
where Hitler planned to make the Room into an
exhibit in the Museum of World Culture after he won
the war. The magical room that had taken 10 years
to create was dimantled within 36 hours by a team
of 6 and dutifully packed into 28 crates. From
there it was loaded on to a train and taken to
Koenigsberg, the former capital of Prussia. (Now
Kaliningrad) The Palace was reduced to a scorched
shell by German bombers even though it was of no
strategic value. The Room itself lay in a dark
cellar until 1945 when the castle in which it was
stored was destroyed by the Russians... it was
never seen again...
The
Mystery:
Despite 50 years of searching by the Russian and
former East German Sercet Service, detectives and
private individuals, the room has never been found.
There are many theories as to the fate of the Amber
Room. Some believe it was destroyed in the Allied
bombing. Others believe it was loaded aboard a
civilian liner and now lies at the bottom of the
Baltic in its of a torpedoed wreck. Some believe it
was shipped out by train before Russian forces took
Kaliningrad, and it now lies buried somewhere,
possibly in the forest, or maybe even under the
Weimar County Hall... In 1991, President Boris
Yeltzin claimed on a visit to the Federal Republic
of Germany that the room had been hidden in a
former NAZI bunker, but investigations failed to
find it. One of the last men to know the
whereabouts of the room died in 1986, a NAZI called
Erich Koch, a greedy art collector who is said to
have uttered the words "Where lies my treasure,
there lies also the Amber Room" on his deathbed. A
mossaic panel from the room recently surfaced in
Germany and it was bought in an attempt to recover
more of the precious room, but unfortunately no
more pieces came to light. Today the room has an
estimated value of over 100 milllion
dollars...
Today
:
The Palace exterior was restored to its former
glory under the communist regime. To account for
this apparent hypocrasy, it was renamed in honour
of the great poet Pushkin who
had grown up in the area and had commented on his
love for it. Russian artisans are struggling to
restore the Room itself, since it seems unlikely
the original will ever be recovered. As you can
imagine, this task would be difficult under ideal
conditions, but I think everyone would agree that
the conditions in Russia are less than conducive to
artistic expression at present. If you have any
news of their progress or would like to express
support, then I'd like to hear about it! I bought
my first piece of amber many years ago on a trip to
the former East German Republic with some German
friends and a friend from Melbourne. We had to get
rid of our Ost Marks before returning home and were
searching for something reasonable to buy... We
found some little amber tears mounted on pendants
in a rather sad but typically "eastern" jeweller.
We knew at once, that we wanted them.
If
you have any interesting facts and figures about
the Amber Room, including wild theories about its
location, I'd like to read them.
Because of the generally Russian tone of these
pages, I thought it logical to construct my own
Amber Room. Even if the original is never
recovered, at least it is in some small way
commemorated by this...
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