Special places archive
July 2001
The amber room
Another colourful place with a Russian connection. A sumptuous chamber lined with amber, designed in 1699 for Friedrich I of Prussia’s Great Royal Palace in Berlin. It has been dismantled, packed up, shipped from palace to palace, installed and restored many times. There were several moves during the Second World War before it was again dismantled, packed into crates and taken in an unknown direction. Since then the room has been lost.
This web site tells this story in detail, as well as showing the project to reconstruct the room in the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg.
Detail of engraved amber mosaic [from the ‘amber room’ website]