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- Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'Timely and powerful.' Financial Times Portable and expensive, amber has always been a desirable commodity. C.J. Schüler follows the historic Amber Route from St Petersburg to Venice through three millennia of history. Throughout his journey, current politics and his own family's experience of persecution and flight are never far from his mind.As he traces the greatest fault lines of European geopolitics and explores lands contested by Romans and Vandals, Teutons and Slavs, empires and the former Iron Curtain, Schüler must also confront his family history, Nazism and the Holocaust.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Mapping theWorld
Mapping the City
Mapping the Sea and Stars
Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies: A History of the Authors’ Club ofLondon, 1891–2016
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
Sandstone Press
Suite 1, Willow House
Stoneyfield Business Park
Inverness
IV2 7PA
Scotland.
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the express
written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © C. J. Schüler
Editor: Robert Davidson
The moral right of C. J. Schüler to be recognised as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland
towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-912240-91-3
ISBNe: 978-1-912240-92-0
In memory of John Schuler
(Johannes David Schüler, Breslau, 1919 – Banbury, 1997)
Contents
Introduction: Flies inAmber
Part I: The Amber Coast – St Petersburg to Kaliningrad
1: The Mystery of the Amber Room
2: Crossing the Gulf
3: Exiles in their Own Land
4: Shifting Sands
5: Back in the USSR
Part II: Ancestral Voices – Gdańsk to Vienna
6: The Delta and the Lagoon
7: Slav and Teuton
8: Island City
9: The Moravian Gate
10: Mozart’s Requiem
Part III: Fortress Europe – Carnuntum to Venice
11: Borderlands
12: Old Gods
13: By the Dragon Bridge
14: A Haven Blessed
15: Waterlogged
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
FLIES IN AMBER
Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’
I am standing in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In a glass case in front of me are some small, irregular beads of dark, honey-coloured amber. Discovered in a Mycenaean tomb in Crete by Sir Arthur Evans, they date from between 1700 and 1300 BC, the dawn of classical civilisation. At around the same time, in north Wales, hundreds of amber beads were placed in a stone-lined tomb along with a body wrapped in the spectacular gold shoulder ornament known as the Mold Cape, now in the British Museum. Amber has been found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and in the ruins of Troy. The Etruscans imported large amounts of it, which they used to adorn jewellery, as did the Romans after them.
My fascination with the substance began as a child. My father had a small piece of opaque, tawny amber, about an inch long, crescent-shaped and holed in the middle like a bead. I have it on the desk in front of me as I write. It was a relic of his days as an apprentice telephone engineer in pre-war Germany, and he would use it to demonstrate its electrostatic properties. After suspending the amber from a length of thread, he would rub it on his sleeve and hold it over an ashtray, so that flakes of ash would fly up and adhere to the resin, like iron filings to a magnet. It was the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC, who first discovered amber’s ability to attract seeds, dust and fibres after being rubbed on wool. The ancient Greek name for amber, elektron, is the root of the word electricity.
The amber came from the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, where it was washed up by storms and gathered by local people. It began its existence as resin oozing from the trunks of conifers in the prehistoric forests of northern Scandinavia between 40 and 50 million years ago. Carried downstream by rivers, the resin settled in a layer under what later became the southern Baltic some 10,000 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded. In the course of time, it was transformed into amber by the processes of polymerisation and oxidation. Some even made its way into the North Sea to wash up on the shore of Suffolk. Amber is also found in Siberia, the Far East, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. It was Dominican amber that inspired Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and the Steven Spielberg film that followed. The premise, that a mosquito trapped in amber could contain a sample of dinosaur DNA, appeared far-fetched at the time, but since the discovery in 2015 of the feathered tail of a small dinosaur in a piece of Burmese amber, it seems slightly less improbable.
It is the Baltic deposits, however, that are the most plentiful, producing around 90 per cent of all the world’s supply, their chemical composition making them easily distinguishable from amber originating elsewhere. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, these golden nuggets had mysterious properties: cool in summer, warm in winter, they often contained glimmering fragments of plants, insects and even small vertebrates, frozen in the moment they were caught in the trickling honeytrap. Amber was attributed with healing powers, and gave rise to myth and legend. In his Historia naturalis, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder dismissed the old tales in favour of a brisk scientific explanation: ‘Amber is formed by the pith which flows from trees of the pine species, as a gum flows from cherry trees and resin from pines.’ A remarkable understanding that was to be lost for more than 1,500 years.
But how did amber find its way from the Baltic to the shores of the Mediterranean, a thousand kilometres to the south? Pliny stated that the substance came from ‘the islands of the north of the Northern Ocean’. So highly was it prized that the manager of Nero’s games sent an emissary to the far north to collect it. Pliny gave an account of the expedition:
There still lives the Roman knight who was sent to procure amber by Julianus, superintendent of the gladiatorial games given by Emperor Nero. This knight travelled over the markets and shores of the country and brought back such an immense quantity of amber that the nets intended to protect the podium from the wild beasts were studded with buttons of amber. Adorned likewise with amber were the arms, the biers, and the whole apparatus for one day.
In his Germania, written around AD 98, the historian Tacitus mentions a tribe called the Aesti who lived ‘on the coast to the right of the Suevian Ocean’ and collected ‘that curious substance’ from the shallows. He noted that the Aesti could not see any use for amber and were pleasantly surprised to be paid for the pieces they gathered. For the poet Juvenal, writing in the early 2nd century ad, the popularity of this luxury item was a sign of Rome’s decadence: in his Ninth Satire, he associates the fashion for holding balls of amber to cool the hands in summer with effeminacy. The trade was still going in AD 301, when amber was one of the goods specified in the Emperor Diocletian’s edict regulating prices.
Many people view globalisation as a recent phenomenon and fear it as a threat to national identity. Yet the world has been criss-crossed by trade routes since the Neolithic. Phoenician seafarers traded tin from Cornwall; Roman coins are found throughout India; Arab silver dirhems in Anglo-Saxon burials in England. Amber is an ideal commodity for long-distance trade – like silk and spices, it is light, portable, and of high value. But is the written evidence of Pliny and others supported by any physical trace of the route it took?
On a wet and blowy Monday night in February 1925, geographers, explorers, historians and archaeologists gathered at Lowther Hall, the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore in London. The distinguished audience listened transfixed as a young scholar, soldier, archaeologist and poet, J. M. de Navarro, tracked the course of an ancient trade route comparable to the Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean. The sheer length of the route, and its duration, from the Neolithic to the fall of the Roman Empire and beyond, were as thrilling as De Navarro’s methodical and detailed presentation was convincing.
José Maria de Navarro was born in 1893 into a comfortable, cultured and cosmopolitan milieu. His father Antonio, a New York barrister of Basque descent, had married the American actress Mary Anderson and moved to England, settling in an old house at Broadway in Gloucestershire. ‘You, if I may say so, have made yourselves martyrs to the antique, the picturesque,’ commented their friend Henry James. ‘You will freeze, you will suffer from damp. I pity you, my poor dears.’ De Navarro grew up amid his mother’s theatrical and literary friends, who included Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw. On the outbreak of the First World War, he interrupted his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge to enlist with the United Arts Rifles, completing his degree after the Armistice.
Elected a fellow of his college, De Navarro embarked on his groundbreaking study of the Amber Route, travelling through Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary. Significant work had already been done by European scholars such as the Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius and the German Karl Schumacher, but De Navarro was the first – literally – to put the Amber Route on the map. The glass lantern slides he showed to the RGS plotted a trail of evidence – worked and unworked pieces of amber, and the Roman coins and jewellery for which they were exchanged – from the shores of the Baltic through the Alps and down into Italy.
Like most ancient lines of trade, the Amber Route did not consist of one well-trodden path but several, which were used at different periods or times of year according to the prevailing conditions. It is unlikely that many people ever travelled the entire route, like Nero’s emissary; rather they would take a consignment of amber as far as the next trading post, where they would sell it on to another merchant who would carry it on the next stage of its journey.
The main route followed the River Vistula inland from the Baltic. From there it headed south to cross the River Odra at Wrocław, once the eastern German city of Breslau, before continuing into what is now the Czech Republic, and down the River Morava to join the Danube at the border of Austria and Slovakia. Near the confluence of these two great rivers stand the ruins of Carnuntum, the Roman frontier town where Marcus Aurelius composed part of his Meditations. From here, a Roman road, the Via Gemina, ran south through the Hungarian plain before descending the Julian Alps to the Roman city of Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic, where the raw material was crafted into jewellery.
As I unfolded a large Freytag & Berndt map of Europe to trace the route, the places it passed through sparked another connection. Not only was Breslau, the city where my father was born in 1919, one of the most important staging posts on the Amber Route; the central section, from Gdańsk to Vienna, ran like a string of beads through a number of smaller Polish towns where my ancestors lived and worked, studied and worshipped. For many years, I knew little of this. My grandfather left Germany in 1936 to escape the Nazis, and obtained a job in Genoa, where he lived with my grandmother and their younger son. Against all advice, my father stayed in Dresden to finish his apprenticeship. In 1937, while he was visiting his parents in Italy, a friend’s mother wrote to warn him that it was unsafe to return to Germany. After a series of adventures that took them to Yugoslavia, my father and his brother eventually arrived in London.
With the family scattered by Nazism and divided by the Cold War, I grew up in a Britain in which it was odd to know that your ancestral home was a city that could not be found on any modern map, and of which few people had even heard. The imperative was to fit in, to be as English as possible, yet I was obscurely aware of a connection to something else. Only with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 was I able to meet my relatives in East Germany and begin to explore Central Europe. Then a stout parcel arrived in the post – a family history compiled by my cousin Irene Newhouse in the United States – and I began to have some idea of the social and historical background that made me.
As I studied the map, an idea took shape, and a sense of adventure began to stir. An epic journey beckoned: I would follow the Amber Route by whatever means were available, by bus, train or boat, along river valleys, though forest paths and along Roman roads. Winding its 2,500-kilometre course through 12 countries and three millennia, the route traces some of the deepest fault-lines in European history: between Romans and Vandals, Teutons and Slavs, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and the former Iron Curtain. This is no coincidence. The very topography that made it a viable trade route – navigable rivers, fordable crossings, passes through the mountains – also afforded passage to invaders, from Attila the Hun to the mechanised legions of Hitler and Stalin.
One country looms large in this story, though the route does not cross one square metre of its present territory: Germany. Though the main deposits now lie beyond its borders, amber still washes up on its shores, on the sandy beaches from Rügen to Usedom where my family used to take holidays between the wars. (Old photo albums show them relaxing in Strandkörbe, those hooded basketwork chairs still used by German holidaymakers to shield themselves from the Baltic wind.) Moreover, much of the route passes through a phantom Germany, those regions lost after two world wars that now form parts of Russia, Lithuania and Poland.
It was the political situation in Europe that prevented De Navarro from following up his researches: ‘The Iron Curtain and the Iron Age proved incompatible bedfellows,’ he observed ruefully. Travelling through the Russian Federation and the new EU member states almost three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found them still scarred by the detritus – physical and moral – of the Soviet Union, and struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the past. At times, especially in Russia, I felt it wise to alter people’s names and other details that might identify them; in some cases I was asked to do so. Readers may draw their own conclusions from this.
In recent years, however, the Amber Route has become a symbol of hope and renewal, passing as it does through many of the newest EU member states. Wherever you go in Central and Eastern Europe, you will find amber: Yantar in Russian, Meripihka in Finnish, Merevaik in Estonian, Dzintars in Latvian, Gintaras in Lithuanian, Bursztyn in Polish, Bernstein in German, Borosty’n in Hungarian and, in Italian, Ambra. In Lithuania, amber is the raw material for a tradition of craft jewellery rooted in the country’s landscape. In Poland, it became identified with the Solidarity movement, and a symbol of national liberation.
In 2007, the Council of Europe designated the Amber Road as a Cultural Route, one of a series of transnational itineraries such as the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela that are ‘illustrative of European memory, history and heritage and contribute to an interpretation of the diversity of present-day Europe’. It would run from St Petersburg to Venice, and gave rise to conferences, cross-border projects between museums, and even a long-distance cycle route from Gdańsk to Croatia. At a conference in Vilnius in 2012, the project’s director, Dr Eleonora Berti, spoke of the need to promote ‘artistic, cultural, commercial and political links’ in order to ‘transcend the cultural and political barriers which marked Europe during and after the great conflicts of the twentieth century’.
Little did I know, as I set out on my journey, how soon and how severely those brave ideals would be challenged, or how sharply the region’s historic fault-lines would reopen.
PART I
THE AMBER COAST
ST PETERSBURG TO KALININGRAD
The English are not like the Russians – not any more. They were like the Russians at the time of their Queen Elizabeth I, when they produced their Shakespeare. But not now.
Anthony Burgess
CHAPTER 1
THE MYSTERY OF THE AMBER ROOM
The night was cold, the lane a dark crevasse between stone tenements. A light drizzle slicked the pavement. Though it was not yet 11pm, there were few cars about, and fewer pedestrians. The only signs of life came from a couple of dimly lit basement bars. Crossing an old bridge over the Griboyedov Canal, I inhaled a miasma of damp plaster, methane and the throat-catching rasp of brown coal. Along an embankment lined with spindly, blackened lime trees, bright interiors could be glimpsed through windows, their golden light reflected on the water. To my right, a red neon sign reading SEX SHOP in English was mirrored in the wet asphalt.
No sign advertised the guesthouse, so I scanned the dimly illuminated numbers over the dark archways. Each number referred to a tenement or dom, comprising not just the five or six floors of apartments fronting the street, but the warren of houses in the courtyards beyond. Eventually I located an inconspicuous grey building, its steel door scarred, rusting and graffiti-etched. An entryphone admitted me to a dilapidated stairwell, with a once-elegant wrought-iron banister and worn mahogany rail; the landings were littered with beer cans, vodka bottles and cigarette ends. A small lift occupied one corner, but a torn scrap of paper taped to the door read Nyerabotayet – not working. On the fourth floor, another steel door opened to admit me. Zina, the old lady delegated to let me in, brusquely informed me that the manageress would be around in the morning to register my visa with the police.
The journey had taken me through three time zones. After an hour in transit at Riga, I climbed aboard an alarmingly small, propellor-driven Fokker 500 for the final leg to St Petersburg. The ever-more tedious security checks and immigration controls are all too familiar to any traveller; in addition, because I was self-employed, the Russian consulate in London had demanded three months’ bank statements. I thought of Stefan Zweig’s evocation of the vanished era before the First World War. ‘There were no passports, no visas,’ he recalled, ‘and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without having seen one.’ After that cataclysm, he added, humiliations once devised ‘with criminals alone in mind’ were imposed on every traveller.
Zweig, as he himself acknowledged, grew to adulthood in a rare interval of peace and security in Europe. For Elizabeth Rigby, a Victorian traveller arriving in St Petersburg in the 1840s, the experience was less civil:
A rush of fresh uniforms boarded us from another vessel, who proceeded to turn out the gentlemen’s pockets and the ladies’ reticules, and seemed themselves in most admirable training for pickpockets . . .
From the airport at Pulkovo, I took a battered 113 bus to Moskovsky. Passengers threw the 26-ruble fare on to a greasy rug on the transmission box, which groaned and juddered every time the driver changed gear. We passed under a labyrinthine interchange, along wide streets of Soviet buildings overlaid with the illuminated signs of the new consumerism. As we drew up at a set of traffic lights, I looked into a neighbouring bus and caught sight of a woman in late middle age, clasping a shopping bag, her drawn, anxious face framed by relaxed young people in baggy jeans, cocooned in another world by the white leads trailing from their ears.
When the bus pulled up opposite an enormous, floodlit granite obelisk, I realised with a start that I had been here before – decades before, when the city was known by another name. This was the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad. In September 1941, the German high command issued a chilling directive: ‘The Führer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth. The further existence of this large town is of no interest once Soviet Russia is overthrown.’ It was the beginning of a gruelling siege that lasted almost 900 days. Despite supplies brought across the ‘Road of Life’ – the frozen waters of Lake Ladoga – up to 1.5 million soldiers and civilians died of hunger.
Walking away from the monument, I passed through a shopping arcade to the metro, bought a jeton from a woman behind the counter, and let it fall with a clunk into the turnstile. The escalator – a grandiose example of Stalinist classical moderne – was the longest and steepest I’d seen, its bronze neo-Roman torchères on fluted columns casting their beams to the vaulted ceiling. No one bothered to walk up, and few to walk down. The St Petersburg metro is the deepest in the world, on account of the marshy ground – and the expendability of labour in Stalin’s Russia.
I emerged into Sennaya (Haymarket) Square, a large oblong flanked by 19th-century buildings and packed with market arcades occupied by late-night cafés, liquor shops, convenience stores, and stalls selling pirate DVDs. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was set here, and the area still had an edgy feel, as hipsters drank in fashionable bars while disabled veterans of Russia’s wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya begged on the streets outside. The Soviets cleaned up the neighbourhood, renaming it Ploshchad Mira (Peace Square) and sweeping away the market, though the old police station, where Dostoyevsky’s guilt-stricken protagonist Raskolnikov surrendered to the authorities, still stood at an angle across one corner. Now the market was back, along with the old name.
Once Zina had scuttled off, I found myself alone in the guesthouse. My room was basic but clean, and looked on to a bleak lightwell with tiled walls. I unpacked, and set out my maps, guidebooks and notes on the table. The location, in the dark heart of St Petersburg, seemed an appropriate base from which to explore the city.
St Petersburg did not exist in the heyday of the Amber Route, yet it is inextricably associated with it on account of the presence – or rather the absence – of the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo. Looted by the Nazis in 1941, it disappeared at the end of the Second World War, and had now been painstakingly recreated – though there are those, both in Russia and abroad, who have never given up the search for the original.
I had last set foot here in February 1983. We arrived on the overnight train from Moscow, after a long journey through seemingly endless, snow-covered pine forest. A samovar of tea bubbled at each end of the carriage. Leonid Brezhnev, the granite-faced General Secretary who presided over two decades of stagnation, had recently expired. His successor, Yuri Andropov, was a former head of the KGB who, despite his role in crushing the 1956 Hungarian uprising, was hailed as a reformer. When he died suddenly 15 months later, power reverted to the old guard in the shape of the moribund Konstantin Chernyenko.
In those days, it was only possible to visit the USSR under the guidance of Intourist, the state tourism agency. Now privatised, it was then in effect an organ of the KGB, and visitors were closely supervised. The tour had to be booked months in advance; I had planned it with my then girlfriend, but by the time our visas came through, the relationship had chilled to the temperature of the Russian winter. Our fellow travellers were the usual suspects: left-leaning journalists, writers, trade unionists and a moderately well known actress. None would have called themselves an apologist for the Soviet system, but I think it fair to say that they all had some lingering sympathy for its original ideals, however much these had atrophied.
I had a personal motive for visiting, having grown up with half my relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain. My great-uncle Georg Honigmann, a journalist and pre-war member of the German Communist Party, had married Litzi Kohlmann, a glamorous Hungarian-Jewish revolutionary from Vienna. The only keepsakes Litzi possessed were a few photographs of her parents and ‘an English student with a pipe in his mouth, very good looking . . .’ The enigmatic Englishman was Kim Philby, to whom she had been married for 12 years. Honigmann and Litzi’s daughter Barbara later rediscovered her Jewish faith and emigrated to the West, where she is now an acclaimed novelist. In her memoir Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, she recalls how she had no idea of her mother’s past until their Berlin home was besieged by British journalists after her ex-husband defected to the Soviet Union.
I spent the next day getting my bearings. Peter the Great’s ‘window on the West’ was founded on 16th May 1703, on land conquered from Sweden, to give Russia the port it needed to become a European power. Between 10,000 and 20,000 serfs and prisoners of war were forced to work in the mosquito-ridden marshes, while the aristocracy were ordered to transport stone – in short supply in a sandy river-mouth – to the site to build palaces. Situated in the Neva delta on 40 islands linked by 400 bridges, St Petersburg was dubbed ‘the Venice of the North’ by Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s sidekick and the city’s first governor, sealing its reputation as an alien transplant. Largely designed by foreign architects, what eventually rose from the mud was a cityscape of soaring spires and elegant colonnades, long vistas and grand public spaces, in sharp contrast to Moscow’s huddle of brick battlements and onion-domed churches.
St Petersburg radiates from the point where the River Neva divides around the Strelka, the pointed tip of Vasilyevsky Island. In that bleak Cold War February, we found the Neva frozen so solid you could drive a tank across it, yet leaning against the stone revetments, a woman was sunbathing in a bikini, her fur coat held open like a flasher’s mac to shield her from the Arctic wind. Across the ice, the slender golden spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress glimmered in the wintry sunlight. There were few cars except for the heavy black Zil limousines of the party apparatchiks. For most of the time we were shepherded through a numbing succession of propagandist museums: the Museum of Communications, the Exhibition of Economic Achievement, the First Five-Year Plan Palace of Culture . . .
We were not encouraged to roam the city, but with a little ingenuity – and a few backhanders – it was possible to slip the leash, to mix fleetingly with young people desperate for jeans and Western pop music, see the long queues for tired vegetables on the half-empty shelves of drab shops, and catch a glimpse though an archway into filthy courtyards where men washed themselves at standpipes like a scene from Depression-era Britain. This dour, sclerotic gerontocracy was the socialist utopia in which so many had believed so fervently and for so long.
My uncle, who with Honigmann’s assistance had crossed from the British to the Russian sector of Berlin, hoping to build a better society on the ruins of Hitler’s Reich, used to tell an old Soviet joke: Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev are travelling together on a train when it stops, inexplicably, in the middle of nowhere. ‘The only thing that will get us moving again,’ declares Lenin, ‘is a new economic plan.’ A new economic plan is devised, but the train remains stationary. ‘Bah!’ declares Stalin. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ He steps out of the carriage, and shortly afterwards a shot is heard from the driver’s cab. Still the train refuses to budge. ‘I have an idea,’ says Brezhnev, and pulls down the blinds. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘We are moving again!’
Now, more than two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was nothing to prevent me wandering as I pleased. Superficially, Nevsky Prospekt remained as it was when I had last seen it, an imposing boulevard flanked by a mixture of 19th-century neoclassicism and early 20th century Art Nouveau. But the streets were now crowded with mobile phone shops and sushi bars, the skyline bristling with satellite dishes and Pepsi adverts. By far the most noticeable contrast was the traffic. Rust-bucket Ladas spluttered and bellowed like beasts of burden as drivers punished their engines in an attempt to outpace the sleek BMWs and chunky 4x4s on either side. If the silent grandeur of Leningrad appeared to preserve, in the amber of a command economy, the historic aspect of St Petersburg, this was an illusion. In the years before the Russian Revolution, the city was industrialising fast, and the brash commercial metropolis described in Andrei Bely’s 1905 novel Petersburg bears an uncanny resemblance to its post-communist incarnation:
The motorcars’ roulades in the distance, the rumble of the red and yellow trams . . . In the evening the Nevsky is flooded by a pall of fire. And the walls of many buildings burn with gemstone light: words composed of diamonds sparkle brilliantly: ‘CoffeeHouse’, ‘Farce’, ‘Tate Diamonds’, ‘Omega Watches’.
Beyond the Nevsky, in striking contrast to the neoclassical Kazan Cathedral, the brightly painted, turbanned domes of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood brooded beneath a leaden sky. The embankment narrows where the apse juts into the canal, allowing the altar to rest on the exact spot where Tsar Alexander II was fatally injured by a bomb thrown by the anarchist group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) in March 1881. His assailant, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, also died of wounds sustained in the explosion, making him one of the first recorded suicide bombers. Around the exterior, plaques listed the murdered tsar’s achievements, a combination of relentless territorial expansion – the conquests of the Amur, the Caucasus and Central Asia – and liberal reform: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, relaxation of press censorship, greater autonomy for Finland and the establishment of schools throughout the empire.
Alexander was killed not in spite of his reforms, but because of them. Liberalisation might have prevented, or at least delayed, the revolution; a reactionary backlash, on the contrary, would hasten it. If the intention was to provoke one, it succeeded. With its dumpy columns, ogee windows and asymmetrical domes, the church embodies a 19th-century revivalist vision of medieval Muscovite architecture, as if trying to stamp an ‘authentic’ Russian identity on this polymorphous city conjured out of the marshes by a tsar hell-bent on Westernisation. Its construction presaged a wave of Russification that would outrage nationalist sentiment in Finland and the Baltics, creating a cauldron of resentment that erupted in the uprisings of 1905. Pogroms were launched against the Jews, so that between 1881 and 1914, an estimated three million fled Russia, mainly to the Unites States and the East End of London.
The Catherine Palace, home to the legendary Amber Room, is located some 25 kilometres south of the city centre. The minibus was scheduled to depart from Gostiny Dvor, an elegant yellow and white shopping arcade on Nevsky Prospekt. There has been a market here since the 18th century. Once these covered passages were thronged with bearded peasants and kaftaned Jews; now they were sleek with high-end international chains: Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Donna Karan. The many jewellers on the upper floor displayed a plethora of amber: beads, pendants, brooches, rings. Much of it, I was informed, came from Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic that contains the world’s largest amber mine.
When I arrived at the bus stop, there was no one there but the driver Pavel, our guide Alitsiya, and a young Frenchman visiting his Russian girlfriend. A party of tourists had been delayed. After much phoning, Pavel agreed to collect them outside Moskovsky station. Edging through the gridlock on Nevsky Prospekt, we picked them up, five elderly Indians from Hertfordshire, just off the train from Moscow, before driving out through the industrial fringes of the city. Beyond the ring road, a scrubby landscape of small trees rose gently to a range of low hills, crested by two rusting howitzers that marked the limit of the German advance in the Second World War. Beside the road was a military graveyard; a small Orthodox church, in the traditional style, had recently been built beside it. Descending the hill, we entered Pushkin, a town with a population of 100,000. The original name Saarskaya Myaza, Finnish for Island Farm, was later corrupted to Tsarskoye Selo, or ‘Tsar’s Village’. The Soviets renamed the place in honour of Pushkin, who attended the lycée here, and although the palace had reverted to its original name, the town was still called after the poet.
As we passed through an Egyptian-style gate into expansive parkland, the palace came into view, a long façade of white, blue and gold, with gilt atlantes and caryatids flanking tall arched windows. Originally built for Catherine I, the wife of Peter the Great, between 1718 and 1724, Tsarskoye Selo owes its Rococo exuberance to the empress Elizabeth, who had it completely refashioned by her favourite architect Rastrelli in the 1750s.
We ascended a sweeping staircase of white Carrara marble to the imperial apartments. The Throne Hall was a riot of white plaster, gilt curlicues, candelabras and mirrors beneath a fiendishly clever trompe l’oeil ceiling that queasily shifted perspective as one moved around the room. Vladimir Putin holds receptions here for world leaders; oligarchs hire it for their weddings. The profuse gold leaf looks unnervingly new, as indeed it is. On 22nd June 1941, the day Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, the young curator of the palace, Anatoly Kuchumov, received the order to pack up its treasures for evacuation. On 17th September, Tsarskoye Selo fell to the Germans. By the time the siege of Leningrad was lifted in January 1944, the building was a wreck; wartime photographs show this enfilade of rooms gutted to the brickwork, snow drifting in through shattered windows.
Catherine the Great thought Elizabeth’s love of Rococo extravagance vulgar: ‘These people had merchants’ taste,’ she reportedly said, before commissioning the Scottish architect Charles Cameron to design a suite of rooms in a more sober, classical style. And there it was: the Amber Room. It was smaller than I expected, and with the light refracted from glowing nuggets of amber, mirrors and gilt sconces, it felt like being submerged in a jar of marmalade. Théophile Gautier, who visited in the 1860s, experienced the same sense of disorientation and wonder:
The expression ‘The Amber Room’ is not just a poetic hyperbole, but exact reality . . . The eye which has not adapted to seeing this material, applied in such scale, is amazed and blinded by the wealth and warmth of tints, representing all colours in the spectrum of yellow, from smoky topaz up to a light lemon. The gold of carvings seems dim and false in this neighborhood, especially when the sun falls on the walls and runs through transparent veins . . .
Gradually the room resolved into its component parts. The wall on the window side was plain; the other three were faced with traditional tripartite panelling, covered in an intricate jigsaw of amber, clear and cloudy, tawny and honey-coloured, backed with gold foil to reflect the light. Cartouches enclosing the monograms FR – (Fredericus Rex) with the single-headed Prussian eagle, and EP (Elizaveta Petrovna) with the double-headed Russian one, bore testimony to the room’s evolution: commissioned by the elector Friedrich III of Prussia, given to Peter the Great, and set up here by his daughter Elizabeth. The wall panels were divided by mirror-surfaced pilasters framing four marble mosaics by the Florentine artist Giuseppe Dzokki, depicting the senses, Sight, Taste, Hearing and Touch andSmell. Panels of clear amber were engraved with delicate intaglio seascapes; others had relief carvings of biblical scenes. In the frieze at the top, gilt putti frolicked lewdly amid swags of carved drapery.
The room underwent many transformations in its long and troubled history. When Friedrich’s wife Sophie Charlotte commissioned Andreas Schlüter to design the interiors of her palace at Charlottenburg in Berlin in 1696, the architect found dozens of chests filled with raw amber from the Baltic in the cellars. He summoned the craftsman Gottfried Wolfram from Copenhagen to create a room panelled with the substance. Wolfram devised a method of softening amber in hot water laced with honey, linseed oil and cognac so that it could be extruded to wafer thinness, and produced 12 large panels, each four metres high, ten smaller panels, and twenty-four sections of amber-covered skirting board.
But then the project stalled. Sophie died suddenly of pneumonia in 1705, and in 1707, Schlüter was exiled after a tower he had built for the Berlin Mint collapsed. Friedrich Eosander, a young architect then in favour at court, was appointed in his place. When Wolfram refused to hand over the panels, Eosander broke into his workshop and stole them. Wolfram instigated legal proceedings against Eosander, who counter-sued and had the craftsman jailed. By the time Friedrich died in 1713, the room had yet to be assembled. His son and successor, Friedrich Wilhelm I, had no interest in this expensive and troublesome project; he sacked Eosander and had the panels put into storage.
In November 1716, Peter the Great paid Friedrich Wilhelm a visit in Berlin. Peter had long been fascinated by amber, having bought a copy of Philipp Jacob Hartmann’s book SucciniPrussici (‘Prussian Amber’) in Königsberg back in 1696. To cement their alliance, Friedrich gave him the panels, which were packed up in 18 crates, loaded on to carts and dispatched to St Petersburg; in return, Peter gave Friedrich fifty-five giant soldiers and a goblet he had made himself. The following summer, the panels arrived at Peter’s new Summer Palace on the Neva. When Menshikov supervised the unloading, he encountered a flatpack nightmare: many pieces were broken or missing, and there were no instructions on how to reassemble them. The Amber Room went into storage again, and there it remained until 1743, when Elizabeth commissioned the sculptor Alessandro Martelli to install it in the Winter Palace. As the panelling was not sufficient for the room she had in mind, mirrored pilasters were used to pad it out.
In 1755 she decided to move the room again, this time to her new palace at Tsarskoye Selo. Here, it was reassembled in an even larger room; as there was no money to pay for more amber, fake panels and yet more mirrors were used. After Catherine the Great ascended the throne in 1762, she decided that the Amber Room was in need of renovation. More than 900 pounds of amber were shipped from Samland, and four carvers hired from Königsberg to replace the fake sections with the real thing.
There the Amber Room remained until 1941. It was not among the treasures moved to Siberia to escape the German advance; judging the panels too fragile to dismantle, Kuchumov hid them behind false walls. It was a terrible mistake. When the Russians were finally able to return in January 1944, there was no sign of the Amber Room. The Germans had crated it up and sent it to Königsberg, where it was exhibited in the castle until it disappeared, in circumstances still shrouded in mystery, during the closing days of the war.
In the decades that followed, the pursuit of the missing room became an obsession, with the KGB pitted against the East German Stasi, and assorted freelance treasure hunters joining the fray. Several suffered mysterious deaths. Two British journalists, Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, spent years investigating its fate, publishing their findings in a 2004 book The Amber Room:The Untold Story of the Greatest Hoax of the TwentiethCentury. Neither their conclusion that the Amber Room no longer existed, nor their portrayal of the Russian bureaucratic obfuscation they encountered in their search for it, won them many friends, even among the liberal intelligentsia of St Petersburg. ‘Even if their findings are basically correct,’ one woman told me crisply, ‘their approach was somewhat unsympathetic.’
What I was looking at was a replica, the work of modern craftsmen and women who laboured for more than twenty years to recreate this ‘symbol of Russian cultural and art losses’. Only one colour photograph, an autochrome dating from 1917, exists of the original room, but detailed drawings and black-and-white photographs – assisted by computer modelling to calculate the depth of the relief – enabled the restorers to recreate it in painstaking detail. Even the names of the makers and repairers, scratched here and there in the shadow of a decorative moulding, were reproduced, to which the restorers, with justifiable pride, added their own. Six tons of amber from Kaliningrad were used in the work, which was eventually completed in 2003 at a cost of €12 million, with financial support from the German energy company Ruhrgas. The room was finally unveiled by President Putin in the presence of the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and other world leaders on 31st May that year, the tercentenary of the founding of St Petersburg.
The four marble mosaics were recreated from the original watercolour designs, which survive in the Museum of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence. Then, in 1997, one of the originals, Touch and Smell, was offered for sale in Bremen by a man called Hans Achtermann, whose father, a former Wehrmacht officer, had looted it during the war. Achtermann was arrested, and the panel was returned to Russia. Apart from some slight variation in colour, where the restorers seem to have matched the original cartoon more closely than their 18th-century counterparts, it proved remarkably similar to the recreation, inspiring confidence in the accuracy of the rest of the restoration work.
Except that it all looked too new. It was not just a question of the colour, which would mellow in time, but the accuracy of the joins, the perfection of the fit. The original had been moved and damaged on several occasions. The backing boards had warped, pieces of amber had shrunk and fallen off, and the whole was patched and repaired many times. The reconstruction represents a state of perfection that the original never attained. It is a Platonic ideal of the Amber Room as it existed in the imagination of its seekers. It is also a labour of love and pride, and it is hard not to be moved by the skill and dedication of the craftsmen and women who devoted decades of their lives to the fulfilment of this impossible dream.
The installation of the Amber Room at Tsarskoye Selo necessitated the establishment of a workshop to make running repairs. When not busy maintaining the room itself, the artisans turned their hand to smaller pieces such as chess sets, caskets and figurines. Fortunately these items survived the war, having been taken to Novosibirsk for safety, and are now exhibited in a modern gallery on the ground floor of the palace. There is a delicate little samovar of clear amber dating from the 1790s, and even a set of gentleman’s toiletries commissioned by Catherine the Great for her lover Grigory Orlov. The domesticity of these items is touching: the amber-handled shaving brush, soap dish, studs and pomade flasks are not far removed from the kind of present a woman might give the man in her life today. When the decision was taken to recreate the Amber Room, the workshop was re-established, and its craftspeople once again began to create icons, goblets, caskets and candlesticks, which were displayed alongside the work of their 18th-century predecessors.
Leaving the museum, we walked through the grounds in the gathering dusk. Catherine had two gardens created here, one in the French style, with formal parterres and geometric avenues of trees, the other in the English landscape tradition, with lakes and pavilions set amid undulating lawns and woods. As our party headed back towards the bus, I looked up at the lighted windows of the long green façade to see the tawny glow of the Amber Room radiating into the night.
What other amber, beside the Room, could be found in St Petersburg? The Hermitage seemed the obvious place to look. One of the world’s greatest art galleries, it was set up in the Winter Palace in 1764 when Catherine the Great bought a collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings from a Berlin art dealer, and opened to the public in 1854. In the classical galleries, which most visitors hurry through on their way to the Renaissance paintings, my eye was caught by a Roman sarcophagus from the 2nd century AD, depicting the fall of Phaeton. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells how Phaeton begged his father, the sun god Helios, to let him drive his chariot. Unable to control the horses, the youth careered about the sky, scorching the earth until Zeus struck him dead with a bolt of lightning. His body fell into the River Po, where his sisters, mourning on the riverbank, were metamorphosed into poplar trees. In Arthur Golding’s Elizabethan translation:
Now from these trees flow gummy teares that Amber men
doe call,
Which hardened with the heate of sunne as from the
boughs they fal
The trickling River doth receyve, and sendes as things of
price
To decke the daintie Dames of Rome and make them fine
and nice.
It was a powerful, intense, dynamically rendered scene: Phaeton tumbles headlong, his hair ablaze, amid flailing horses and shattered fragments of his chariot while his sisters weep and his friend Cygnus, transformed into a swan, dives into the river to retrieve the smouldering corpse. A few rooms further on, in the Pompeian gallery, I found some of the ‘gummy teares’ themselves, a set of chunky, dark honey-coloured faceted amber beads, dating from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, from northern Asia Minor.
Upstairs, crowds of visitors were marvelling at the old masters. Few ventured into a grey side-corridor where a collection of ‘trophy art’ was furtively displayed. These paintings were war booty, in some cases twice looted, first by the Nazis and then by the Red Army; they were not included in the Hermitage’s online catalogue, and could not be exhibited abroad for fear of confiscation. The small but stunning collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists included works by Renoir, Monet, Manet, Sisley, Gauguin, Van Gogh – a lovely landscape with a house – and Cézanne – a self-portrait and one of his Mont St-Victoires. The insistence that the missing Amber Room still exists in a cave somewhere in Germany is believed by some to be a bargaining ploy against demands for the return of these works.
I wandered through an endless succession of imperial apartments, overwhelmed by their scale. In the Malachite Room, the doorknobs were faceted globes of amber held in brass eagles’ talons. The room was a triumph of power over taste, a demonstration of the tsar’s ability to have two tons of this richly veined green mineral hauled hundreds of miles from the Urals in the days before railways. It was amid this brooding splendour that Alexander Kerensky’s impotent Provisional Government vacillated as the cruiser Aurora, moored just across the Neva, fired the shot that gave the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace.
As I looked out of the window across the river, the two Roman-style rostral columns on the Strelka gave out a burst of flame, like a summons to move on. I made my way across the Palace Bridge to Vasilyevsky Island, past the columns and the university, to Peter the Great’s Kunstkammer – his cabinet of curiosities. The green and white church-like building was built to house his collection of curios: conjoined foetuses preserved in jars of alcohol, skeletons of children with two heads, deformed animals and so on. Grotesque as it seems, Peter assembled the collection not out of morbid curiosity but to spread scientific understanding and banish old superstitions, at a time when Puritan settlers in New England were burning innocent women for witchcraft.
Up the winding stair into the tower was a monument to another great Russian moderniser, a recreation of the laboratory established here in 1748 by Mikhail Lomonosov. A fisherman’s son from the far north, Lomonosov was a man of extraordinary versatility: a chemist whose Elementa Chymiae Mathematica (1741) anticipated Dalton’s theory of the atomic structure of matter; a ceramicist who revived the art of mosaic in Russia; and a poet, playwright and grammarian who laid the foundations of the modern Russian literary language. The circular, vaulted chamber was dominated by the large round table at which the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences met in the 18th century. Around the room were scientific instruments of the period: retorts, a large burning lens and an electrostatic generator operated by a crank handle. On a leather-topped chest of drawers stood Lomonosov’s pen and inkwell, his brass microscope, and a box of mineral samples including pieces of malachite and amber.
