Lynn:

You are half right - "Schliemann's Treasure" was taken by the Soviet
Army, but 180 degrees out on the "Amber Room"!

Peter the Great's Amber Room was taken by the Germans during, or at the
end of the, siege of Leningrad in 1941-2, and was reported to have been
seen dismantled in Germany in late 1943.  However it was not found by any
of the four allied powers at the end of the war in 1945, and has never
been seen or heard of since.

My personal two pennies-worth (and having seen the size of the original
room from which the Baltic amber panelling was removed) is that it is
almost inconceivable that something of that size still exists - unless
the remains are in some long-destroyed and lost underground mine.  More
likely it would have been dismantled and cut up: there was certainly a
huge amount of high quality Baltic amber in the jewellery trade in the
1950s and 1960s, even though "primary" production and collecting was not
on a particularly large scale.

The Troy collections of Schliemann (who was, incidentally fined 40,000
Turkish pounds for stealing the collection from the excavations) survived
the war in temporary secure storage of the Berlin Museums, and were taken
immediately to the USSR by the Red Army in May 1945.  The collection
remained under military-governmental control (though housed in an off-site
storage building of the Pushkin Museum of Art in the Zagorsk Monastery
complex about 50 miles from Moscow) for nearly 50 years.  However, in
1993, the Russian Minister of Culture took legal control of the collection
- and placed it formally in the care of the Pushkin Museum pending
negotiations under a cultural restitution treaty between Russia and
Germany.  Two years ago the Puskin put Schliemann's "Treasure of Priam"
and other items on exhibition.

Pres. Yeltsin has several times now proposed transferring such material
back to Germany but each time the Duma (Parliament) has vetoed this,
demanding that any returns can only be in exchange for the (to be honest)
far greater amount of material taken by the Germans from the USSR and
still missing - the missing Amber Room being the top of the Russian
"wants" list.


Patrick Boylan

==================================


On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, Rio Grande Valley Museum wrote:

> Subject: Re: Amber Room, Schleimann's Treasure (gold from Troy)
>
> Hi!  Can anyone tell me what former Soviet/now Russian (I think) museum
> (or palace or .....) holds these two treasures.  A friend is headed
> toward that part of the world and wants to see both.  They were both
> taken by Soviet troops invading Berlin (?) at the end of WW II.
> Possession was only admitted in the last couple of years.  Thanks.
> Linn
>