Author Topic: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace  (Read 82668 times)

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Offline Belochka

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #60 on: September 07, 2005, 10:30:49 PM »
Quote
This led to its immediate confiscation and subsequently its solemn return by the German Government to the Russian Government.   Together with the mosaic, a chest of drawers which had stood in the Amber Room before the Second World War and was rediscovered in a German private collection, was returned.   '....the mosaic had, as it turned out, been stolen by an officer of the German army before the Amber Room was transferred to Konigsberg.'


This is very interesting!

Thanks Tsaria for presenting these details.

Do you know when the stolen items were returned?


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nikks

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #61 on: September 09, 2005, 08:57:31 AM »
I think in the 70s

Offline ChristineM

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #62 on: September 09, 2005, 09:51:18 AM »
If I recall correctly it was 2000 or 2001, Belochka.   We were present at the official handover, but I cannot remember exactly which visit.

tsaria

Valmont

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #63 on: September 09, 2005, 02:21:10 PM »
i GOT THIS FROM THE 7/24/00 ISSUE OF  US NEWS.
It is an article by  Chystian  Caryl


It vanished in the wake of World War II–an 11-foot-square hall walled with amber and other semiprecious stones and worth $142 million in today's dollars. One of the only pieces to be found is a small mosaic of jasper and onyx.

In 1716, the king of Prussia presented the Amber Room, a masterpiece of Baroque art, to Russian Czar Peter the Great. Catherine the Great later commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to embellish the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, just outside the city. "When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling," wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov. "It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light was reflected in the warm gold surface of the amber and sparkled in the mirrors, gilt, and mosaics."

This opulent gesture of friendship between Russians and Germans would come to serve as a potent symbol of their divisions. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, his troops overran Tsarskoye Selo, dismantled the panels of the oversized jewel box, packed them up in 27 crates, and shipped them to Königsberg, Germany (today's Kaliningrad). In January 1945, after air raids and a savage ground assault on the city, the room's trail was lost.

After the war, the German official in charge of the amber shipment said the crates were in a castle that burned down in an air raid. A Soviet investigator found a charred fragment from the room. Others think the palace sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea in a torpedoed steamer or was stashed in an abandoned mine in Thuringia. Serious historians of the subject have little hope that the room will ever be found. Nonetheless, the Internet bubbles with Amber Room-related theories. A German film company even made an Indiana Jones-style movie based on the story.

War trophy. Reality caught up with the fantasies in 1997, when a group of German art detectives, including a former Stasi agent, heard talk that someone was trying to hawk a piece of the Amber Room. Police raided the office of a lawyer in Bremen who was trying to sell the work for a client–the son of a German officer who had accompanied the wartime convoy to Königsberg. The son said he had no idea how his father got the mosaic. One theory is that the crates of amber were bombed on the road and the father swiped a chunk of the room as a war trophy, figuring no one would be the wiser. In April, officials from Berlin presented the recovered mosaic to Russian President Vladimir Putin–along with an intricately inlaid chest from the Amber Room that had also turned up–in a goodwill ceremony faintly and oddly reminiscent of that first kingly gift just under 300 years ago.


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« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Valmont »

nikks

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #64 on: September 09, 2005, 02:22:21 PM »
I viseted the room, it's very nice to see, though boring. :o

Offline Belochka

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #65 on: September 09, 2005, 11:42:08 PM »
Thanks Valmont for the extremely interesting article. :)



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Robert_Hall

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #66 on: September 10, 2005, 02:21:51 AM »
Boring ? I think not.
Actually, I will be looking for some pieces to fit my own "Amber Room".  My doll's house. Cannot recreate, of course, but just the right lighting...

Greg_D

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #67 on: September 12, 2005, 01:50:27 AM »
Boring  ??? :o

How can anyone call such a monumental piece of work Boring ??

I agree it might not be to everybodies taste, but one cannot fail to be impressed by the craftmanship that went into the recreation, or the sheer "stateliness" of the room ... It was created to impress, and so it surely does.

Offline Belochka

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #68 on: September 12, 2005, 02:23:57 AM »
The new Amber Room is an outstanding example of Russian ingenuity. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

While the re-creation was long and laborious it was exacting and close to perfection.

Russians take immense pride with this achievement.

To suggest that it is "boring" can only be held as an insult to the masters who created it.

:(


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M_Breheny

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #69 on: September 19, 2005, 04:10:09 PM »
When I visited the Catherine Palace in July we were allowed to take photographs, for a fee, or everything except the Amber Room. No pictures, with or without flash, were permitted in that room.   I had to make do with a beautiful postcard.  The Amber Room truly is magnificent and I loved viewing it.  As for size, I think it did seem a bit smaller than I had originally thought it would be -- but it still was spectacular.

Mary

helenazar

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #70 on: October 31, 2005, 08:17:01 PM »
Here is the link to the travelogue of my tour of the Amber Shop at the Catherine Palace:  

http://www.geocities.com/mushkah/Amberroom.html


helenazar

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #72 on: December 06, 2005, 05:37:00 PM »
Amber jewerly & objects d'art created by one of the   six artisans who worked on the Amber Room reconstruction:

http://www.geocities.com/mushkah/AmberArt.html



« Last Edit: May 10, 2009, 07:30:13 AM by Svetabel »

Offline Lucien

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Offline Vladimir_V.

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Re: The Amber Room of the Catherine Palace
« Reply #74 on: February 21, 2008, 10:38:32 AM »
Big PR for the small town.

Every year the same.

found found found
Can you tell me why they use the verb ‘find’ in the Past?



« Last Edit: February 21, 2008, 10:46:49 AM by Vladimir_V. »