'World's biggest jewelry box' re-created in Russia

TSARSKOYE SELO, Russia — Hidden for now behind a white screen from the prying eyes of visitors to Catherine Palace, the painstakingly re-created Amber Room glows with the yellows, oranges, reds of the late-afternoon sun. Intricately carved frames of amber showcase four elaborate mosaics made of semiprecious stones. Amber roses and amber people and amber landscapes festoon the walls.

It is, as museum official Yuri Dumashin put it while marveling once again at its baroque extravagance, "the world's biggest jewelry box."

Yesterday, after 24 years of work, the reborn Amber Room officially debuted as part of nearby St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary celebrations. Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled it with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and fellow leaders from three continents on hand.

"This masterpiece has become a symbol of the new relations in the united family of our greater Europe," Putin said.

The original Amber Room — an 18th-century fantasy dreamed up by a Prussian king and made more elaborate by a series of Russian czars — has been missing since the Nazis carried it off in 1941 and has since ignited imaginations and a series of treasure hunts.

St. Petersburg is a city of extravagances, a czarist relic of pastel palaces and gilt excesses. But even here the Amber Room stands out. The walls are paneled with 500,000 amber tiles dyed and fitted together in a design so intricate that to call it a massive jigsaw puzzle is an understatement.

Amber, the translucent fossil resin left by long-extinct trees, is most often seen in small objects: beads, amulets, rings. Rebuilding the famous czarist wonder took more than 6 tons of high-quality amber from the Baltic Sea. The re-created, $11.5 million room is 1,080 square feet. The amber panels cover three of the 26-foot-high walls; windows cover most of the fourth wall. A team of Russian master artisans has worked full time since 1979 to refashion the room with little more than a series of prewar black-and-white photographs for guidance.

Obsessive history

The complexity of the place is overwhelming: the minute pictures etched onto amber medallions, the impossible precision required to fit the panels together, the years of trial and error to find the right kind of beeswax to hold the amber plates in place. How not to be amazed by the historical detective work that went into deciding which 20 shades should be used to dye the amber? How not to marvel at the sheer over-the-topness involved in creating such a room for the second time?

Indeed, it is the obsessive history of the Amber Room that sets the place apart.

One tale tells of how the Amber Room came to Russia. The first amber panels were noticed by Peter the Great on a trip through Prussia. He arranged a trade with the man who had conceived of the Amber Room, Prussian King Frederick William I. He gave Peter the room; the Russian emperor sent him 55 unusually tall soldiers in return. (Collecting giants to staff his special regiment was a hobby, some said an obsession, for Frederick William, who was known for his many quirks.) The room came to be forgotten by Peter, only to be installed in Catherine Palace many years later by his daughter Elizabeth.

It is the Amber Room's more recent history that lend it an air of mystery. Seized by the Nazis in 1941, the room was dismantled and taken to the Prussian capital of Konigsberg, where it remained for the rest of the war in the city's gloomy medieval castle, according to historians.

But when the Soviet Army seized Konigsberg in 1945 after a withering bombardment (it is now Kaliningrad, Russia), the Amber Room could not be found. Ever since, treasure hunters have searched for it, digging up cellars, scouring churches and caves.

The elaborate reconstruction has become a legend, too. Work began in 1979 but faltered after the Soviet Union's collapse. After the government-provided $8 million for the project ran out, the German company Ruhrgas came through with $3.5 million to finish the job in time for the 300th birthday of St. Petersburg. The irony of a German company helping replace something taken by the German army was lost on no one.

Re-creating the room was an enormous task. Even basic techniques for creating the exquisite panels had to be researched and reinvented by the craftsmen.

"It was all starting from zero," said Alexander Krylov, the chief restorer. "In essence, we re-created, totally from scratch, techniques of working with amber that existed in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the acme of this art."

Labor of love, money

At the amber workshop on the palace grounds, where he and several dozen others labored for much of their lives to resurrect this elegant apparition, Krylov showed off his dollhouse-scale version of the room, complete with tiny lights and miniature amber panels.

Krylov built it at night during the past 18 months, while working frantically by day to complete the new Amber Room in time for the May's festivities.

It's hard for Krylov to explain his passion or why the Amber Room became such a symbol for Russians today. But he is indignant at suggestions that the $8 million the government provided was not money well spent.

"Reading the newspapers during the years when I was working on this Amber Room," he said, "I saw that there were some people who managed to rob this country so well that they could afford to build 10 Amber Rooms in their own houses. All I managed to buy in the time I was working on this room was a hammer and a pair of pliers."

Catherine Palace has barely enough money to care for the czarist treasures it holds. Officials have resorted to every creative moneymaking venture, from renting the museum to Bill Gates to charging journalists 250 euros an hour for previews of the redone Amber Room. When the Ministry of Culture ordered the museum to repaint the entire palace in time for the 300th-anniversary festivities, it promised to pay for the paint job, but the money never came.

For those awaiting a chance to glimpse the Amber Room one day last week, there was little question it was money well spent.

"It would be like not spending money for restoration of the Louvre," said Jean Dausset, a visiting Parisian who pronounced himself unfazed by the grandeur of Catherine Palace. "I am French," he said. "I go to Versailles often."

His Russian guide laughed. The money and effort lavished on the Amber Room, she said, at least marked something positive for this turbulent country: "It's better than spending the money for war."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.