Russia: The result of almost two decades of painstaking work and more than $10 million will be unveiled in a palace outside St Petersburg today, when the leaders of Russia and Germany open the recreated Amber Room, whose legendary predecessor was stolen by marauding Nazis troops, writes Daniel McLaughlin in St Petersburg
Even as residents of the old Tsarist capital have watched its architectural and artistic gems restored to former glory for the city's 300th anniversary celebrations, they have waited with special anticipation for a glimpse of the new Amber Room, 62 years after the original disappeared without trace.
"It has special, unique significance, after all these years and all the work that's been done," said St Petersburg academic Mrs Irina Nekrasova yesterday. "No one knows what truly happened to the first Amber Room, but we can only hope the new one will have a happier fate."
Dozens of world leaders are expected to join Russia's President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder today for the official opening of the Amber Room, which expert craftsmen have constructed from six tonnes of the Baltic Sea's finest amber.
Once the 500,000 tiles of the fossilised tree resin were in place, the intricate work of decorating their surface - which shimmers through warm gold and red to deep orange and yellow - began in earnest.
Ornate amber frames now surround mosaics of animals, birds and flowers and the eight-metre high walls, studded with precious stones, are said to create the impression of being inside the world's largest jewellery box.
Through post-Soviet funding crises and political uncertainty, dozens of Russian craftsmen dedicated much of their working lives to the room, and to learning skills that disappeared centuries ago, when the original Amber Room was created.
Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I presented Peter the Great with the chamber in 1716, as a symbol of friendship between their lands, and it became part of the stunning Winter Palace on the banks of St Petersburg's Neva River.
Catherine the Great later ordered her craftsmen to stud the room's walls with semi-precious stones, and moved it from the Winter Palace - today better know as the Hermitage Museum - to her opulent summer retreat at Tsarskoye Selo, about 30 kilometres outside the city.
As the Nazis swept through the Soviet Union in 1941, they dismantled the room and took it to their Baltic port of Koenigsberg, which came under massive Allied attack before the Red Army captured it and renamed it Kaliningrad.
The room's jewel-encrusted amber panels have not been seen since Allied bombs ripped through the city, and though Nazi records say they were shipped to Saxony intact, their fate has remained a mystery for more than sixty years.
One theory places the room at the bottom of the Baltic, where the ship allegedly carrying it to mainland Germany sank. Others insist it still lies where it was buried for wartime safety, in Czech or German mineshafts.
Hopes that the Amber Room had survived the war were boosted in the 1990s by the appearance in the German city of Bremen of a bureau and a Florentine mosaic from the Tsarskoye Selo palace.
But as the trail went cold on the whereabouts of the original chamber, so the money began to run dry to fund completion of its successor.
Amid frequent squabbles between Russia and Germany over art treasures stolen by both sides during wartime, it was a German gas company that came up with more than $3 million to boost Moscow's funds to ensure the Amber Room was reborn.