Amber Room

Lost since 1945; a reconstruction stands in its place. The amber-panelled chamber in the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, near St Petersburg, was taken apart by German soldiers of Army Group North within 36 hours in 1941 and reached Königsberg that October. The trail goes cold there. A Soviet report concluded it was destroyed in April 1945, yet its fate has never been settled. The best-known fragment to resurface is an Italian stone mosaic found in Germany in 1997 with the family of a soldier who said he helped pack the room. What visitors see today is a reconstruction by Russian craftsmen, paid for partly by German donations and inaugurated in 2003.