It was the crowning glory of the Catherine Palace, a room lined from parquet to plafond in amber. It was the gift of a Prussian king to Peter the Great, who was so obsessed with amber that he traded several dozen Russian soldiers for a life-sized box of it.
Harvested from the bottom of the Baltic Sea and carved painstakingly by hand, the ancient resin that became The Amber Room had, suspended in it, the stories of many centuries of life.
But after vanishing during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941, The Amber Room itself became the story — its disappearance one of the world’s great mysteries. Hear how spies, and lies, and Cold War collusion kept the truth about a glowing, golden treasure from seeing the light of day.
Guests:
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, authors of “The Amber Room.”