Amber

AMBER

I became acquainted with amber in a London arcade in 1978. An old man with a heavy European accent sold me a piece of antique jewellery. It was dark brown Baltic amber with a tear drop on the end. It had belonged to a Jewish lady from Poland. She sold the family heirloom on her way to America from Poland in the 1940s. Here it is:

I was entranced with this jewellery. It was valuable, yet no stone. It was warm, not cold to the touch - ancient beyond imagination. Amber is fossilised tree resin which is at least 50 million years old. The trees are long extinct, but their resin is thrown up on the sea shore or buried underground.  It has been valued for its colour and natural beauty since Neolithic times.  It was used by the Vikings as a form of exchange, like gold.  Many treat it as a gemstone and use amber for a variety of decorative objects.  In its uncrafted state it is also used as an ingredient in perfumes, as a healing agent in folk medicine, as well as jewellery. Because it originates as a soft, sticky tree resin, amber sometimes contains animal and plant material.

My husband noted my interest and bought my second piece of amber as a gift. This was red Chinese amber. Here it is:

I was lucky enough to discover a Polish lady at the Queen Victoria market who understood my desire.  She had several pieces of natural amber, necklaces she carried to the antipodes for medicinal purposes. She offered them to me at a reasonable price. Here is one of them:

A Lithuanian friend discovered my interest and gave me several pieces of crafted amber like this:

I went shopping around Melbourne and bought a few pieces that looked as if they had shreds of leaves embedded in them. I was imagining things. These pieces consisted of tiny bits of amber heated up and welded together. Nice - but not quite right.

Insects in amber are highly prized, and can be acquired on the internet. The following video at

 is very informative. Here are some examples of insects in amber discovered in India in 2010.  This is an ant captured in tree resin 50 million years ago.

Pieces like this are available from Colombia on the internet. They look very interesting, but I am not sufficiently expert to consider them. 

In Istanbul, for example, a stall holder persuaded me to buy a piece that he had been told was ‘royal amber’ - the amber beloved of the Czars. In the half light of the bazaar, I was taken with the silver work.  The piece looks impressive but is not even high quality plastic. However much I rub it, it does not pick up tiny bits of paper. This is not amber, but it didn’t cost much either.

Have obsession, will travel. I wanted to see the Amber room in the palace of Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg,  so I travelled across Mongolia, Siberia and Russia by train. When we reached Catherine’s city -  Ekaterinburg -  I found a few pretty pieces in the Museum shop. They were made from small pieces of amber. Here is one of them:

Finally, I arrived in St Petersburg, and made my way to the amber room in the summer palace of Catherine the Great.

Yantarnaya komnata (the Amber Room) was built as Frederick I’s study at Königsberg Castle in 1711. Five years later, it was given as a present to Peter the Great to commemorate Prussia’s alliance with Russia. It was later installed in the palace of Catherine the Great at Tsarskoye Selo, the opulent summer residence of the Russian royal family just outside St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad). It contained six tons of amber.

When the German armies besieged St Petersburg / Leningrad during the Second World War, the Nazis dismantled the Amber Room. They took it back to where it originated and displayed it in one of the halls of the Königsberg Museum. In 1945, it was packed away in crates and has not been seen since.

Its disappearance is the subject of many theories and crime novels.

Meanwhile, in the 1980s the international price of amber soared  because the Russians decided to re-create the original amber room. The reconstruction began in 1979 at Tsarskoye Selo and was completed 25 years—and $11 million—later. In 2004 it was dedicated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to mark the 300 anniversary of St Petersburg. I saw it in 2005. Here it is:

 

I was overwhelmed. There was just too much of a good thing.

The Russians prize milky or yellow amber. They call it ‘Royal Amber.’ It was overpriced in Russia but reasonably priced in Lithuania.

In the amber room at St Petersburg however, I first saw black or very dark red amber subtly articulated in masses of the Baltic variety.  I was unable to leave this expensive, beautifully crafted piece behind:

 

In Vilnius, Lithuania, I acquired large strings of antique milky amber which were deep yellow to orange. I was now saturated with Baltic amber. There is no doubt, a moral in all this, but green, Sicilian amber was now my impossible desire. The more interesting pieces I acquired were mottled royal amber with a green tinge, like this:

I believed my interest in amber as an excuse for travel had come to an end. I had pieces of brown, red, black and green amber. The size and value of the collection led me to invest in a safe. But  amber should be worn , close to warm, vibrant flesh. Perhaps the time has come to give it away.

Then, I discovered the existence of this green and  blue Colombian amber on the internet and the old desire took hold. I haven’t been to South America – yet.