Much has been written about the elusive Amber Room, but the mystery remains.
'Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas. Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words... Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase.'
-Victor Hugo, Book 5, Chapter II -The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The origins of the Amber Room lay in Prussia. Originally installed in the Charlottenberg Palace, the panels which embellished this room consisted of over 6 metric tons of baltic amber. In 1717, these amber panels were presented to Peter the Great of Russia as a gift from Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, strengthening the alliance between these two nations.
'Only in The Thousand and One Nights -and in magic fairy tales, where the architecture of palaces Is trusted to magicians, spirits and genies, one can read about rooms made of diamonds, rubies, jacinth and other jewels used for jewelry- the expression 'The Amber Room' Is not just a poetic hyperbole, but exact reality. The eye which has not adapted to seeing this material, applied in such scale, is amazed and is blinded by the wealth and warmth of tints, representing all colours [in the] spectrum of yellow - from smoky topaz up to a light lemon. The gold of carvings seems dim and false in this neighborhood, especially when the sun falls on the walls and runs thru transparent veins, as though sliding... '
At the order of Catherine the Great, in 1755 these panels were installed in a room in Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, creating the Amber Room we know of today. Decorated wall to wall with amber and gold leaf, this room stood as one of one of Imperial Russia’s greatest national treasures.
Until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, no major alterations or changes had been made to the appearance of the Amber Room. During this time, the room was deconstructed and the large amber panels of which the room consisted were looted by German forces and taken to Königsberg.
Following an air raid on Königsberg by Allied forces in 1944/1945, the prized panels went missing. To this day, the location of the original Amber Room panels remain a mystery, although many believe they were either destroyed during the last years of the second World War or currently stand in a private collection.
The looting of the original amber panels by German forces was not the end of the Amber Room at Catherine Palace. In 1971, the Russian government began the process of reconstructing the Amber Room; the funding for the project coming largely from German donation. In recent years, the final reconstruction and restoration of the Amber Room has been completed following decades of effort. Standing as both a symbol of recovery following the invasion of Russia during the second World War as well as an attraction to be enjoyed by the Russian public and international tourists alike, the history of Amber Room at Catherine Palace is one of beauty, conflict, mystery, and reconstruction.
Sources:
1) Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa. Pg 190.
2) http://www.amberjewelry.com/Tracing-the-Amber-Room-s/95.htm
3)http://www.ambercave.co.uk/blog/history-of-amber-room/
