Ed tells me that the inside of Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood  “is… seriously over the top. I like the Russian Orthodox for its restraint, and there is none whatsoever in that church.”

Must be all those mosaics. Maybe the Russians were trying to outdo Byzantine churches – taking that whole Third Rome idea seriously, at least when it comes to adorning sacred spaces. On the other hand, I’ve read that there might be more square feet of mosaics decorating the Cathedral of St. Louis than even the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, and as far as I know no one’s claiming St. Louis as a new iteration of Rome.

The inside of Spilled Blood is just another thing I missed, not because I didn’t visit a certain place, but because I didn’t visit a certain place at the right time. That happens a lot; it has to, if you go anywhere at all. Some things, you want to miss – far better to visit St. Petersburg in 1994 than 1944, for instance. But I’m not thinking of anything quite so dramatic. Not long ago, I read about the reconstruction of the Amber Room, which is near St. Petersburg, and which wasn’t finished until 2003, meaning I missed that too.

It’s quite a story, the Amber Room. The Smithsonian says that the original room, whose construction started in 1701, ultimately “covered about 180 square feet and glowed with six tons of amber and other semi-precious stones. The amber panels were backed with gold leaf, and historians estimate that, at the time, the room was worth $142 million in today’s dollars. Over time, the Amber Room was used as a private meditation chamber for Czarina Elizabeth, a gathering room for Catherine the Great and a trophy space for amber connoisseur Alexander II.

“A gift to Peter the Great in 1716 celebrating peace between Russia and Prussia, the room’s fate became anything but peaceful: Nazis looted it during World War II, and in the final months of the war, the amber panels, which had been packed away in crates, disappeared.” (The whole article is here.)

Burned in a bombing? Buried in an unrecoverable place? Put at the bottom of the Baltic Sea by torpedoes? There are a number of ideas about what happened to the original, but nothing conclusive. Nothing like a good mystery involving treasure.