English Project "The Amber Room"

The Amber Room

   The original Amber Room in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg, was a complete chamber decoration of amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. Due to its singular beauty, it was sometimes dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World".

   The Amber Room was created from 1701 to 1709 in Prussia and remained at Charlottenburg Palace until 1716 when it was given by Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I to his then ally, Tsar Peter the Great of the Russian Empire. The Amber Room was looted during World War II by Nazi Germany and brought to Konigsberg. By the end of March 1942 the amber room was on display in Konigsberg Castle in a special room. Knowledge of its whereabouts was lost in the chaos at the end of the war. Its fate remains a mystery, and the search continues. A reconstructed Amber Room was inaugurated in 2003 in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

   The concept of the room and its design was by Andreas Schlьter. It was crafted by Gottfried Wolfram, master craftsman to the Danish court of King Frederick IV of Denmark, with help from the amber masters Ernst Schacht and Gottfried Turau from Danzig. It did not, however, remain at Charlottenburg for long. Peter the Great admired it on a visit and in 1716, Friedrich Wilhelm I, the first king's son, presented it to him, and with that act cemented a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden.

   In 1979 a reconstruction effort began at Tsarskoye Selo, based largely on black and white photographs of the original Amber Room. Financial difficulties to the project were solved with USD $3.5 million donated by the German company Ruhrgas AG. By 2003, the titanic work of the Russian craftsmen was mostly completed. The new room was dedicated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the 300-year anniversary of the city of Saint Petersburg.

Officially, and most plausibly, the Amber Room was destroyed in 1944 during an allied air-raid on its storage place: Königsberg Castle. But, while historians, treasure-hunters and mystery addicts are confident the room was in Königsberg during 1943, they're not so sure about the destruction. People have claimed the amber was hidden by the SS in a silver mine or a lagoon, that the shipment was sunk or blown up, even that over-zealous Red Army soldiers smashed it themselves.

Marina Borisova 1АТМ