Advent Calendar: Day 13

By Circe -

The Amber Room is one of the most famous lost treasures of modern times.

Originally installed in the Charlottenburg Palace at the behest of Frederich I of Prussia, the Amber Room was the work of artist Andreas Schlüter and craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Most people, I think, assume it was merely a symptom of the excesses of the rich, but it was originally designed as an enormous art piece, not a mere monument to money and power. It remained in place until a visit by the Russian monarch Peter the Great, who admired it so much that Frederich had it packed up and shipped to him as a gift after the two signed a mutual-defense treaty against the grim spectre of... uh, Sweden, who was probably a lot more threatening in those days.


The world kept pretty good track of the Amber Room from the point it was shipped to Russia in over a dozen giant boxes, right up until 1943, when the Nazis packed up and left Pushkin ahead of what they thought was the end of the war. The entire room was dismantled, again packed into boxes, and shipped off to oblivion.

No one has figured out where the crates went. There have been claims over the years, but no one has actually, physically turned up any of the amber, at least not with provable provenance. The simplest, saddest explanation was that the crates were demolished in the bombings of 1944 or consigned to the bottom of the sea by an unlucky torpedo, but as recently as 1997 a single panel purporting to be from the room was recovered in Bremen, and some still believe the room is hidden in Kalingrad.

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