What happened to the most valuable “room” in the world?

When the Nazi army arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia, the soldiers entered one of the palaces that had belonged to the Romanov royal family for thirty years before. The palace was dark and deserted, but one room was different from the rest.

The floor of the room was covered with sand and the walls were hastily hidden behind piles of cloth. But this wonder was not to remain hidden for long.

According to Faradid's report; The soldiers draw back the curtains, and suddenly, in the darkness, a faint glow is seen, not of gold, but deeper and richer: carved garlands of acanthus leaves, roses, mirrors, mosaics of agates and lapis lazuli and ruby ​​gems; A room of light and brilliance that dazzled the eye.

But a short time later, nothing was left of this extraordinary room. The soldiers left and the “amber room” went with them.

Catherine Palace, where the Amber Room was located for a long time

Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, a man whose greatest hobby was kidnapping burly men from London and Vienna and forcing them to serve as his personal bodyguards, was not what one would call an “artist.” He was a stingy man with a harsh demeanor who was obsessed with military protocol. He loved his wife, but despised what he saw as her frivolous interest in painting and music.

However, it was during his reign that one of the most fascinating works of art of the last 400 years first appeared: a room like a jewel box, so full of beauty and detail that it dazzled the eyes. Théophile Gauthier described it in his book Voyage en Russie as something of the legend of One Thousand and One Nights. He wrote: “The eye is amazed and dazzled by the richness and warmth of the colors that show all the yellow spectrum.”

In its heyday, the Amber Room was visited by thousands, admired and envied, moved between numerous royal courts, as the personal health room of the Empress of Russia, and as a political chess piece to forge alliances between countries. Was used. Everyone who saw it had something to say. A German maid caught a glimpse of it and sent an astonishing letter to her lover in Weimar, enthusing about the indescribably beautiful room whose “value could never be calculated.” Contemporaries called it the eighth wonder of the world. But today the Amber Room is a treasure lost in the layers of time, hidden behind by the flames and political paperwork of a great war.

Part of a modern replica of the Amber Room rebuilt in Catherine Palace

This room had a long and eventful history, it “travelled” unlike any other room in the world and was last forgotten and disappeared in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, Russia, in 1944, just before the bombing of the city.

What happened to the legendary room of Friedrich Wilhelm?

Alfred Rudd, the director of the Königsberg Museum where the Amber Room was last kept, swore to his superiors that the room's amber panels had survived the bombing, but had told a family friend weeks earlier that they had been destroyed. In the German city of Bremen in 1997, a mysterious man tried to sell one of the room's four colored marble mosaics, prompting prompt government intervention. A decade earlier, in a forest in the state of Bavaria, a treasure hunter who had devoted years of his life to searching the room was found with his stomach ripped open; An event that fueled rumors of Soviet assassination and cover-up. The story of the room is long, winding and still unfinished, but to understand even a fraction of its legend we must go back to the very beginning.

The Amber Room was first created in the workshop of Andreas Schlotter, the court architect of Frederick I. Baltic amber, the fossilized sap of prehistoric trees that can be polished to an array of lovely colors, had been accumulating in Danzig in the 1600s, and in 1701 it was decided to do something to display the gems. Work on the amber room began and it took 13 years to complete with the presence of several master craftsmen.

In early 1717, the room was moved to St. Petersburg and installed in the Old Winter Palace. Then, in 1755, when the Russian court moved out of town, the room went with it to the Catherine Palace.

In Catherine's palace, there was a slight problem: the space allotted for the Amber Room was six times the size of the relatively plain original room. The queen ordered that it be expanded. This is where the room became a real masterpiece. Two Italian architects took on the task of expanding the amber panels, decorating the room with Venetian mirrors, gilded statues, Florentine mosaics, and mother-of-pearl inlays, transforming the small room into the most magnificent room the human eye had ever seen. Even the floor was a work of art inlaid with 15 types of wood. When finished, this room became Catherine the Great's favorite room in the palace, one she used both for gatherings with her inner circle and for her personal meditations. By candlelight, the amber exuded a warmth that no other room in the palace could replicate. During an endlessly dark Russian winter, the room was like a temple of light and warmth.

In addition to its visual appeal, amber was considered a wonder cure for many ailments at the time. The room survived the rise and fall of several kings as well as the bloody Bolshevik Revolution unscathed. Then, in 1941, Hitler's troops arrived at the gates of the Soviet Union.

Königsberg Castle was the last place where the Amber Room was seen

As the enemy forces rapidly approached St. Petersburg and the Tsar's village, the palace guards panicked. Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov, the young curator of the museum, found the room so large and heavy that he thought it could not be moved. Over the centuries, amber had become brittle and it was thought that it could no longer be moved. So Kuchumov attached cloth and various cushions to its walls and covered its floor with sand in a futile attempt to hide it from the Germans.

In September 1941, German forces reached the abandoned palace. The Amber Room's disguise failed to fool them. A pair of soldiers found the panels under cover. Within 36 hours, the room was packed and sent by train to the Baltic Sea.

In the fall of that year, the room made its last known journey, arriving in Königsberg on October 17, 1941. Over the next few months, Mr. Rohde assembled and redecorated the room on the upper floor of the Teutonic Knights Palace. Rohde was an expert in amber art and had worked hard to save the amber room.

On November 13, 1941, a German newspaper published the headline “Amber Walls in the Palace” and the room was opened to the public. The room was a propaganda tool: if you could steal the Amber Room from under the noses of the Soviets, then their forces would soon be defeated. But behind the scenes, the war was not going well for the Germans. The superiors in Berlin were worried about the loss of ground and the looting of Germany by the Allies. The room was soon dismantled again and packed in boxes.

In late August 1944, Königsberg was bombed by the Soviets in retaliation for the Moscow bombings. Lisle M., a friend of the Rohde family, recalls riding her bike into town the next morning to make sure her friends and family were safe. He met Rode in the ruins of the castle courtyard. He took her to the basement where the Amber Room panels were allegedly stored for safekeeping. In an interview with Anthony Wilson in his documentary In Search of the Amber Room, Liesel spoke of a honey-like mass covering the rocks. “It's all gone,” he remembers Rohde telling him.

Königsberg Castle after the bombing by the Soviets

Then, strangely enough, on September 2, 1944, Rohde wrote to his superiors in Berlin that “the Amber Room has survived, except for six pans.” Rohde's son recalls his father telling him that the Amber Room had been “moved to a safe place.”

So did Lisle M misremember the castle ruins scene? Or Roode lied to him? Or was the room only partially destroyed and Rohde made Liesel believe it was completely destroyed? There are countless reasons why Rohde might have wanted to conceal the truth about the room's fate. Some claim that he managed to get it out of the city and took the secret of its location to his grave. Others say the room was so badly damaged by smoke in one of the early raids on the city that Rohde hid it out of shame. According to this theory, the unrecognizable scarred panels were eventually incinerated as waste.

However, another theory claims that the room that survived the Soviet bombing and invasion of Königsberg was accidentally set on fire by Russian soldiers celebrating their victory. This was certainly not something that the Soviets would readily admit. According to this hypothesis, the Soviets falsified statements and documents and kept the hope of the chamber alive; both to avoid liability for its shameful destruction and to aid reparations claims against Germany in the decades after the war.

Conspiracy theories began to proliferate and all kinds of hypotheses were put forth about who took the Amber Room with them.

There were also scary rumors of a curse as many people associated with the room died mysteriously. Rode and his wife died of typhus in Kaliningrad while the KGB was investigating the fate of the room. Apparently, the doctor who signed their death certificate was never heard from again. General Gusev, a Russian intelligence officer, was killed in a car accident after interviewing a journalist about the Amber Room. Georg Stein, the hunter of the Amber Room, died horribly in a Bavarian forest in 1987 with his stomach apparently cut open with a scalpel.

The legend of the Amber Room persists as there are conflicting accounts and tantalizing hypotheses and clues that stimulate the imagination. Over the past decade, several media outlets have trumpeted the news that treasure hunters have found the room or parts of it.

There are compelling reasons to suggest that the Amber Room may have survived the fire at Königsberg. The Nazis were known to hide valuable items all over the world, so it's entirely possible that the room is still out there somewhere, but it's also possible that everything is truly gone.

A similar example of the Amber Room exists today. Artisans made a copy of it at Catherine Palace using techniques similar to those of amber artisans in the 1700s. This new room is also a surprise made possible by the financial alliance between Germany and Russia.

But the real Amber Room, the one whose panels are steeped in the perfumes of Catherine the Great and echoes the voices of Europe's greatest minds and leaders, is now lost; Maybe it has disappeared and maybe it is hidden somewhere far from the hands and mind of any seeker.