Nowhere else in Europe is amber found in such quantities as in East Prussia. The original resin deriving from primordial pine forests is found in especially high concentration near Palmnicken (in today's Russian Jantarny) on the Samland coast. Its great beauty and variety has enchanted people for thousands of years.
It was ice age glaciers that transported amber from the Samland coast to many regions of Central Europe. It is regularly found especially on the coastal stretches of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Amber is especially suited for the production of jewellery and works of art, but it has had many other positive qualities attributed to it right up to the present day.
The oldest, best-known figures go back to the stone age and are about 14,000 years old. Already in ancient times there was a great demand in the Mediterranean region for amber as a commodity from what was later on to be East Prussia. Later the Teutonic Order took over and dominated both the trade in amber and its processing. The enormous income from the precious material secured the wealth of the state of the Order and later duchy for centuries.
The legendary Amber Room was made from East Prussian amber and given in 1716 by the Prussian King Frederick William I to the Russian Tsar Peter I, the Great. In 1743 it was integrated into the Catherine Palace at Zarskoje Selo near St Petersburg, where it remained until 1941 when the German army dismantled it and took it to the Palace at Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad). All traces of it have been lost since 1945 and it is presumed to have been burned during an attack by the Russian army. In 2003 a complete reconstruction of it was presented at Zarskoje Selo, whose production had been financed by the Ruhrgas AG. Photo: E.ON Ruhrgas
Extraction of amber in open-pit mining near Palmnicken (today Jantarny) in the Samland, 2014. Photo: Dr Christoph Hinkelmann