ámbar (S)
bernstein (G)
âmbar (P)
amber (E)
ambre (F)
Königsberg, germany
The word amber is used to describe a color (a yellowy/golden/orangey brown) but it is also used to describe a gemstone made from tree resin, which trees produce when they are scraped or punctured. Most resins are chemically unstable and will just decay and disappear rather than harden. But when a stable resin is buried in the right place such as under water, it will harden. Amber the gemstone is the hardened, stable resin of ancient trees. How ancient? Most amber is found within Cretaceous and Paleogene sedimentary rocks (so approximately 30 to 90 million years old). Since amber floats, it is often found washed up on beaches. It can also be mined.
While the word amber describes a color, amber the gemstone or resin comes in as many as 300 colors, including green or blue. Some of the most common types of amber include Baltic amber; Mexican amber; Caribbean amber; Green Amber; Copal Amber; Burmese Amber; Blue Amber; and Black Amber. The creation of plastic allowed for a lot of “fake” amber to circulate as jewelry or other items. But remember, real amber becomes powdery when scraped and warms up when kept in your hand. Fake amber flakes when scraped.
Sometimes, creatures have been caught in the hardening tree resin. This is called an inclusion and is desirable in an amber gemstone. Frogs, lizards, geckos, snake skins, bird feathers, flies, ants, beetles, moths, spiders, centipedes, termites, gnats, bees, cockroaches, grasshoppers and fleas have all been found in amber. Amber has helped scientists identify more than 1000 extinct species of insects. And while scientists may have found a dinosaur feather encased in amber, the Jurassic Park movie scenario, where scientists reanimated dinosaurs from DNA trapped in amber, is just not possible. Useable dinosaur DNA wouldn’t survive in amber long enough.
The so-called “eighth wonder of the world” was made primarily of amber. Maybe just because they could, in 1701, King Frederick I and Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia began creating a room paneled in sheets of amber for the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. It was a slow, expensive project and the king and queen died before the room was finished. Their successor, Frederick William, perhaps not as big a fan of amber as Frederick I and Sophia Charlotte, stopped the work. In 1716, Peter the Great of Russia visited, and Frederick William decided to gift him the Amber Room to improve Prussian-Russian relations. The room was packed into crates and shipped to St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Amber Room made its home in a few different places until 1755, when Peter’s daughter had the Amber Room installed in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo (known as the Summer Palace), the summer residence of the tsars just outside St. Petersburg. The Yantarnaya Komnata (in English, the Amber Room) was cherished by subsequent Russian rulers, who added more even more gold leaf and semiprecious stones. It even survived the Russian Revolution.
But in 1941, the Nazis, as part of Operation Barbarossa, invaded their former ally. As the Nazis marched into St. Petersburg, or rather Leningrad as it was known then, the Summer Palace curators, rather than try to move the Amber Room into hiding, glued cloth over the panels and covered the floor in sand, trying to disguise its true identity. It didn’t work. The Nazis felt the Amber Room was really a German treasure, and once again, the Amber Room was loaded into crates and moved; this time to Königsberg, Germany, where it was installed in Königsberg Castle. When Soviet and British forces laid siege to Königsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad) in 1945, Königsberg Castle was destroyed by fire from Soviet artillery.
The question has been lingering ever since: was the Amber Room destroyed? Or had it been once again dismantled and spirited away? Despite many false alarms over the years, the Amber Room has never been found. In September 2021, divers explored a shipwreck from World War II, lying 300 feet under the Baltic Sea. The ship was the SS Karlsruhe, one of the last vessels to leave Königsberg as the Allies invaded. Records indicated it was a large ship with a large cargo, part of which could have been the Amber Room. It was bombed by Soviet aircraft on April 13, 1945, and sank with a loss of almost 1,000 passengers. The divers were unable to find any trace of the Amber Room. Most historians continue to believe that it was destroyed in Königsberg Castle in 1945. And the Soviet Union used the destruction of the Amber Room as a symbol of the country’s losses during World War II.
But wait, you say, I’ve been to the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg, as it is once again known, and I’ve seen the Amber Room. Well, no, you’ve seen a recreation of it. In 1979, the Communist government decided to rebuild the Amber Room. The work was based on black and white photos taken before World War II. The project was difficult and expensive and work stopped after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. But work began again in the 1990s and was completed in 2003, partly due to donations from a German energy company, and the grand opening of the recreated Amber Room was a world event.
1979 was also the year that Elton John, along with drummer Ray Cooper, became one of the first Western rock groups to perform in Russia. Elton John played eight concerts in Leningrad and Moscow between the 21st and 28th of May 1979. A documentary, To Russia with Elton, documents the visit, including showing Elton and Ray visiting the Summer Palace. Alas, their visit was too early to see the recreated Amber Room. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Elton John’s home in Nice, France, is nicknamed the Summer Palace.