The Amber Room
If you happen to visit Tsarskoje Selo, Russia, perhaps you would be lucky enough to see the rebuilt Amber Room. The original Amber Room is the subject of a great vanishing act. Given to Peter the Great by the son of the King of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm I, the Amber Room consisted of thousands of pieces of amber assembled into intricate mosaics and decorated with ornaments, figures and patterns.
In 1941, the Nazis disassembled the room and took it to the German city of Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad, Russia. In 1945, the Soviets captured Königsberg and packed the Amber Room into 27 crates. The original room hasn't been seen since. The hunt continues for the whereabouts of the Amber Room, or proof of its destruction, but nothing has come to fruition.
Opening in 2003, the Amber Room is alive again, having been reconstructed by photographs and memory. Expert craftsmen spent more than 20 years painstakingly carving and rebuilding the beautiful room that had been dubbed The Eighth Wonder of the World. The Russian government relied on donations to help bankroll the enormous cost of the room's reconstruction, including
a massive donation by the German company Rhurgas.
While the Amber Room has been rebuilt, the search for the original Amber Room is still ongoing. In 1983, a cabinet maker was restoring a chest and thought the chest looked like the same one in a familiar picture. He then saw a Russian inventory number on the back and contacted the Tsarskoje Selo museum. The chest was listed in the registry of the Catherine's Ekaterininsky Palace in Tsarskoje Selo, the last home of The Amber Room before the war.
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