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News
31.05.2023

On 31 May 2003, twenty years ago the Amber Room opened after twenty-four years of reconstruction. Since then it has been visited by 23,7 million people.

Presented by Frederick William I of Prussia to Tsar Peter the Great as carved amber panels in 1717, the room was redesigned for the Great Palace of Tsarskoe Selo (Catherine Palace) under Peter's daughter Elizabeth in the 1750s and finally completed by 1770 during the reign of Catherine the Great. Too fragile to be evacuated in 1941, the amber panels were looted by the Nazis, moved to Königsberg and then disappeared, remaining one of the largest unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. Only one eighteenth-century Florentine mosaic from the room's prewar décor was found in Germany in 1997 and returned to Tsarskoe Selo in 2000.

The reconstruction of the Amber Room started in 1979 with seven years of research and project design until 1986. Then followed seventeen years of work until 2003. The masterpiece was brought back to life for over twenty years and with six tons of amber. As Alexander Kedrinsky, the author of the Amber Room Reconstruction Project wrote in 2003, 'Our work will give people an idea of the Amber Room that adorned the palace, the one I saw with my own eyes. I have no doubt, it will be found sooner or later. Such a masterpiece cannot disappear without a trace. And then it will become clear that our craftsmen have created a unique work of decorative art as well.'

'More than just a gem in the museum, to us the Amber Room is a symbol of what was lost in World War Two. It is proof of the highest skills of Russian restorers and an example of selfless work by hundreds of museum workers, researchers, craftsmen and art patrons,' says Director Olga Taratynova of Tsarskoe Selo. A VR version of the legendary interior was developed in 2022.

The twentieth anniversary of the Amber Room's reconstruction is celebrated with a specially designed dessert and the photo exhibition People of the Amber Room Revival which runs at the Admiralty in the Catherine Park from 1 June.