Forever Amber

Soft, sensual, honey colored panels. Mirrored pilasters. Florentine mosaics. Priceless furnishings and some of the most valuable objects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Had the renowned Amber Room survived unscathed to the present day, its value would have been close to $150 million dollars.

Unfortunately, it did not.

“Today at four o’clock in the morning, without

presenting any claims to the Soviet government  and without any declaration of war, German troops attacked our country, attacked our borders at many points and bombed our cities.” On Sunday, June 22, 1941, the curators and museum workers at Catherine Palace in Pushkin (originally named Tsarskoye Selo in 1808 and renamed Detskoye—“Children’s”—Selo in 1918) heard this announcement over the radio. Palace Director Vladimir Ladukhin gathered together his employees the following day and instructed them to immediately prepare all of the palace’s treasures for evacuation.

A fury of activity began around the palace. Yet in the eighteenth century Amber Room, the workers just shook their heads. The sheets of amber were in poor condition. Every time they were touched, stones fell to the floor. Dismantling the room was not an option. The many amber treasures in the room were packed off to the Urals, but the panels would have to be left behind. The workers covered them with wood and hoped for the best.

Air raids began ninety-six hours after the June 22 announcement. Within 60 days, Leningrad was encircled and by the middle of September the noose was drawn tight around the city. In their seige of the city, which was to last 900 days, the Nazis occupied many surrounding towns and palaces, including Catherine Palace in Pushkin. During that time they disassembled the centuries-old amber panels and shipped them back to Germany. This much we know. What happened later has been the basis for endless speculation.

The most popular version is that in 1941 the Germans packed the amber panels into 27 crates, sent them to Königsberg Castle in East Prussia (present-day Kaliningrad), where they were installed in the castle, a grim medieval fortress in the center of the city. In 1945, with the approach of allied forces, the panels were again taken down and either stored in the castle basement or whisked away to another secret location.

Founded in the thirteenth century, this Teutonic fortress, writes Suzanne Massie in Pavlovsk, was “a huge quadrangle with an extensive set of buildings and outbuildings, crowned by a hundred-meter-high tower that commanded the Pregel River and the surrounding countryside.”

Anatoly Kuchumov, former Head Curator of the Catherine Palace, Massie writes, went to Königsberg after its liberation from the Nazis in 1945, which had destroyed 90% of the city. “We went because we had information that a mass of things had been sent there, including the Amber Room panels.

“When we arrived in the courtyard, we found a number of pieces of broken furniture from the Catherine Palace piled in a heap. Proceeding through the burned rooms and half-collapsed arches, I got to the first floor. There was nothing but a large heap of ashes. I was about to turn back when my foot hit something I recognized.” Kuchumov found bits and pieces of many things from the Catherine Palace—hard evidence that the Germans had used the castle as a repository for stolen goods.

Kuchumov revisited Königsberg Castle again and again in the hope that each trip might lead to the repatriation of lost treasures. His visits were always a thorough investigation covering a vast area, including countless rooms, secret passages, and cellars—even one which had been a torture chamber during medieval times.

“We were able to ascertain that the panels had indeed been there, in the sentry tower,” Massie quotes Kuchumov as saying. “Accompanied by soldiers, we searched all of the many underground passages which linked the castle and different parts of the city, but sadly we were never able to find them.”

g Contemporary Amber Room restoration
artist Vladimir Mezentsev noted that, “If they [the Germans] kept them [the amber panels] outside in the open air or anyplace where they would be subjected to the elements, I doubt anything would have remained. The air alone would have destroyed them.”

In 1944, Königsberg was severely damaged by countless Allied air raids. Much of the castle burned to the ground (the ruins were demolished by the Soviets twenty years later). One eyewitness claims he saw a fire and a “honey-colored mass” engulfed by flames. “Amber melts easily,” Mezentsev said, “but when it reaches a temperature of over three hundred degrees, it evaporates.”

Acccording to Massie, Kuchumov felt the panels survived the bombings: “During the American and English air raids over the city, the Germans brought the panels down and hid them in the cellars. The Amber Room was in one of the deep cellars, far underground. It did not suffer.”

“Let’s say the amber panels did survive,” Mezentsev offers. “After transport [from Russia] and storage, probably only one complete panel could have been made from what would have been left today ... because amber, once extracted, only lives three to four hundred years.”

g In 1701, the eccentric Prussian King, Fredrick Hohenzollern I, was extracting tons of amber from the Baltic Sea coast. He wanted to do something with it which had never been done before. So he ordered court architect and interior designer Andreas Schlüter, from Gdansk, to create a room made entirely of this lightweight prehistoric gem, to eventually be installed at his palace in Charlottenburg.

Gottfried Wolffram from Denmark was a specialist in working with amber. He was asked to come to Germany and execute the King’s artistic vision. But, as quickly as the polished stones were adhered to single tiered oak panels, they fell out. Wolffram had never experienced such problems with amber. Every time there was a shift in temperature, the stones changed in color and size. The King was not pleased. He fired Wolffram and Schlüter and employed two new master craftsmen: Gottfried Tuaru and Ernst Schacht, also from Gdansk, hoping things would improve. By 1713, the new team was nearly finished, but King Fredrick had died and his heir, the frugal and militaristic King Fredrick Wilhelm I, ordered that production cease. The completed panels were packed and later moved to the Stadtsschloss in Berlin.

Peter the Great caught sight of them there in 1717, while en route to Paris. A great collector of rare oddities, the Russian tsar convinced Fredrick Wilhelm to give him the panels. In exchange, Wilhelm requested of Peter 55 six-foot-tall “giants” for his Corps of Grenadiers. Peter willingly complied.

Yet Peter never did anything with the amber. After his death, Peter’s daughter Elizabeth took the panels out of storage and had her favorite architect, the Italian Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, mount them on the walls of a room in the Winter Palace. Later, in 1755, Catherine the Great ordered that the Winter Palace Amber Room be transferred to the luxurious Catherine Palace. There it was installed in a ten meter square room, integrating some new Italian enhancements.

Winter Palace, Catherine Palace—wherever the Amber Room was housed—it had a deserved reputation as a difficult work of art to maintain. Under Catherine, four expert craftsmen were hired to reconstruct and service the oversized jewelry box: Johann Roggenbucke, Johann Welpendorf, Clemens Friede and Heinrich Wilhelm Friede. They would be just the first in a long stream of artisans who painstakingly looked after the room for the next two hundred years.

The Amber Room in Catherine Palace covered three walls and was arranged in three tiers. The central tier had eight large, symmetrical vertical panels. Four of these contained mosaics of semiprecious stones (quartz, jasmine, jade and onyx), had been created in the 1750s in Florence, and were designed by the artist Giuseppe Dzokki to depict the five senses: Sight, Taste, Sound, Touch and Smell.

Between the large panels were mirrored pilasters. The lower tier of the room was covered in square panels of amber. In one of the corners stood a small amber table on an elegantly turned leg. The room also featured Russian commodes of inlaid wood, a Chinese porcelain vase and one of the most valuable collections of amber objects created in the 17th and 18th centuries by German, Polish and Russian masters.

It was said that, as the sun set and filled the room with warm light, the Amber Room seemed to glow from within.

g When the Germans left Pushkin in 1945, they burned, blasted, and demolished everything they could. They smashed and shattered. They destroyed and looted. Invaluable furnishings, priceless treasures, centuries-old artifacts, irreplaceable books and more, were gone forever. They left the Catherine Palace a smoldering shell of imperial memories. It didn’t matter that they had stolen the amber panels, the room no longer existed.

For thirty years, spies, experts and treasure seekers searched for the missing panels, dubbed by many “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Over a hundred hiding places were alleged, from safe deposit boxes to salt mines, all coming up empty. Finally, the Soviet government decided the panels would not be found and they would recreate the room from scratch.

In 1979, the Soviet government ordered the reconstitution of the Amber Room. An architect named Khazatsky was hired to find documents and photos from the past. He located numerous black and white photos and one color slide in very poor condition. From these meager clues, restorers divined the thickness of panels and details, the patterns of mosaics and, eventually, the secret technique for dying the amber to near-uniform shades.

Over the next 20 years, the Russian government spent nearly eight million dollars to rebuild the room. But, by the mid-1990s, funding for the effort had slowed to a trickle. The restoration workshop, once a beehive of activity, fell silent.

Then, in 1999, in an appropriate twist of fate, the restoration of the treasure—created, gifted and stolen by Germany—was given new life by Ruhrgas AG, a German company that has imported natural gas from Russia since 1973. Ruhrgas pledged the remaining funds needed for completion of the room on the condition that the Amber Room be fully completed by May 2003, to coincide with St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary. The partially restored room was closed in September 2002 and will not reopen until it is finished. “This will be our gift to the city,” said Director of Tsarskoe Selo State Museums Ivan Sautov. “The official opening of the Amber Room will take place on May 31, 2003.”

g In 1979, there were five craftsmen
working on reconstruction of the “new” Amber Room. Today there are forty. None had prior experience working with amber. “Reconstruction created many challenges for us,” Mezentsev said. “Our main task was to make the room as close to the original as possible, but the biggest challenge was to correct the mistakes of the past.”

For one, this meant building multilevel panels of birch, not single, larger panels of oak. “When the [original] oak panels expanded, the amber shrunk and fell out, because both react to changes in the weather, but not in the same way,” Mezentsev said. The craftsmen found after testing that birch and amber react to shifts in temperature and humidity in exactly the same way. This time the stones would be secure.

It also meant inventing a dye so the amber wouldn’t change color over time. “Young amber is the shade of salted cabbage,” Mezentsev said. “Only after ten to fifteen years does it become the color of honey. We couldn’t wait that long.”

Finally, it meant inventing an adhesive which would hold the amber to the specially treated wood panels without complications. The craftsman tried many variations, but ended up reverting back to an eighteenth century formula based on beeswax. “It’s good,” Mezentsev said. “It has an effect which allows it to remain flexible, so when the birch and amber are expanding, it does as well.”

Rebuilding the Amber Room will require six tons of amber before the job is done. To date, nearly five tons have been used. Yet, only 25% of the raw material (see box, page 37) makes it onto the panels, the other 75% becomes dust. In other words, from a kilogram (2.2 pounds), only one hundred fifty grams (five ounces) is usable.

The amber for this monumental task comes from the same place the amber for the original was taken: the coast of the Baltic Sea. “We’re using forty-million-year-old, high-quality amber, which is greasy and rich,” Mezentsev said, “not eighty-million-year-old amber which is found closer to the earth’s surface. That kind of amber has come in contact with air. It’s dry and cracks easily. The young amber we’re using is from the sea, it’s easy to work with because it has had no contact with air.”

Recreating the design of the room was itself a monumental task: the few existing photos were not clear. Details were indistinguishable. A group of scientists was called in to examine them more closely. They created clay models of the frames and shot photographs from the same angles, comparing light shadows in the old and new photographs to make sure they got the frames’ thickness correct. “The whole process in general—finding wood, making clay, building frames, concocting the dye, all of it—took seven years,” Mezentsev said.

Creating the final panels is more complicated and intense than an expert level jigsaw puzzle. Each of the over 500,000 carefully-shaped pieces–finished as thin as a bar of chocolate—has a specific place on a panel. “The work is addictive,” Mezentsev admitted. “We work and we live here [in the workshop]. This is our life.”  RL