Amber Room

The unrivalled gem of the Catherine’s Palace collection is the unique amber room often referred to as “the eight wonder of the world”. The history of this pride and joy of the collection dates back to the beginning of the 18th century when Peter the Great while travelling around Europe visited Prussia and was mesmerized with unsurpassed beauty of Frederick’s the 1st study elaborately decorated with amber panels. Natural resources of this “sun stone”(petrified sap of coniferous trees) could be found in abundance on the coast of the Baltic sea, so it was not surprising that Andreas Schluter, the chief architect of the Prussian royal court, came up with the idea of using amber, a material never used before in interior decoration, to complete one of the rooms of the Great Royal Palace in Berlin.

Several years later the son of Frederick, Frederick Wilhelm I, asked Peter the Great to accept the panels as a diplomatic gift, the Russian Tsar''s answer to it was no less original: 55 tall and robust grenadiers were presented to the Prussian King. The panels were first installed in the Winter Palace, but in 1755 Empress Elizabeth ordered Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli to move them to the Catherine’s Palace, where a special room was prepared to house them. The individual amber panels were carried from St Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo by 76 guardsmen in six days. They were not large enough to complete the new 100 m decor, so mosaic and mirror insets were added and the upper part of the walls was painted to imitate amber.

The Amber Room is a series of large wall panels inlaid with several tons of masterfully carved high-quality amber, long wall mirrors and four Florentine mosaics. The amber, which covered three walls, is arranged in three tiers. The central (middle) tier consists of eight large, symmetrical vertical panels. Four of them contain pictures made of semiprecious stones like quartz, jasmine, jade and onyx, and depicting five senses: Sight, Taste, Sound, Touch and Smell. The distance between the large panels is occupied by mirrored pilasters. The lower tier of the room is covered with square amber panels. In addition, in the showcases one can observe one of the most valuable collections of amber objects created in the 17th and 18th centuries by German, Polish and Russian masters. The Amber room as a whole represented a really unique masterpiece of decorative - applied art.

In 1941, when Nazi troops were approaching Leningrad, hasty preparations were made to evacuate the most precious items of the Catherine’s collection. However, the invaluable Amber Room was not evacuated due to the fact that amber panels are very fragile and the dismantling of them would have led to almost the same results so a decision was made to preserve the treasures on the walls disguised by paper, gauze and cotton. Unfortunately when German troops occupied the Catherine’s Palace the trick was disclosed and the Amber Room was removed and transported in Koenigsber where it was exhibited in the local royal castle. In 1944, as the German Army retreated the Amber Room was packed into boxes and hidden in a cave under the castle where its trace gets lost. There exists many suppositions of what had happened to the amber panels but still the fate of the Amber Room remains a mystery. Only in 1979 the Soviet government initiated reconstruction of the room, allocating about $8 million. German company Ruhrgas, the biggest importer of Russian gas, joined the project in 1999 and donated $3.5 million. On 31 May, 2003 the legendary Amber room made a dazzling reappearance after a painstaking nearly quarter-century reconstruction.