Amber Museum Top 5

Learn more about amber museums’ offer. Are you an amber enthusiast? You should visit them!

1. Amber Museum in Jarosławiec is a private museum. It was established in 2014. Its goal is to share knowledge about the history and origins of natural amber and amber inclusions. Additionally, it documents precious amber sources in Poland and all over the world. Exhibition – in the private museum, three different exhibitions can be found. Those are the amber forest reconstruction, reconstruction of a natural amber source and inclusions exhibition. Additionally, time-limited exhibitions are being organized with amber manufactures and creations.
2. Amber Museum in Kaliningrad (Музей янтаря) is a special museum collecting amber items of various different characters. The museum is 1000 m2 big. It was established in Kaliningrad in 1979. It is located in the Donhnaturm Tower, which was built in 1852-1853. The tower was named after Karl Friedrich Emil Zu Dohna-Schlobitten, a Prussian agricultural marshal. Russian museum collected over 6000 different amber objects. They are variants of many different natural amber pieces, mostly Baltic amber, but also other types of amber. They also have a special collection of amber with inclusions, some artistic amber objects, amber reproductions and a collection of modern Kaliningrad Amber Manufactures and artists from all over the world.
3. Amber Museum in Palanga is a museum devoted to craftmanship. It was established in 1963 as a department of the Lithuanian Art Museum in Vilnius. It is an important place, that documents amber manufacturing in Lithuania. The museum is located in the Tyszkiewicz palace in Palanga. There are over 28000 pieces of natural amber in the museum’s collection, 15 000 of them include inclusions.
4. Amber Inclusions Museum – the museum of amber inclusion was established in 1998. It is an integral part of the studio of Evolutionary Entomology and the Museum of Inclusions in Amber in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Gdańsk. It was established thanks to amber researchers and amber manufacturers’ devotion and determination. The museum was created to regain an interest in amber in Gdańsk which was significantly reduced after the Second World War. The former head of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology, prof. dr. hab. Ryszard Szadziewski initiated the idea. Amber Inclusions Museum, like almost every other museum, has its own goal. The goal is to collect and store amber inclusions, collecting natural amber pieces and different types of stones, as well as conducting new amber researches. The natural collection in the Amber Inclusion Museum contains materials for taxonomic research and at the same time gives an opportunity to learn about tertiary biodiversity, paleobiology, and paleoecology. The huge collection which was collected in 20 years makes the owner proud. The collection consists of 6000 natural amber pieces and over 14000 natural ambers with zoo inclusions! Another fact worth mentioning is that the whole collection was collected thanks to the generosity of manufactures, students, researchers, and other donators. The collection consists of invertebrates preserved in Baltic amber (up to 95% of the whole collection), animal inclusions from other taxonomic groups, plant inclusions, as well as inclusions that have been preserved in other fossil resins (5%). Holotypes are the most valuable specimens in the collection (on their basis new species were described). In the university collection, there are also several types of insects: over 50 descriptive types (ants, beetles, bedbugs, Hymenoptera, mayweed, reticulatus, mayweed, mites, and dragonfly). The main purpose of the collection is research. The museum is well equipped, which helps the researches and students conduct complicated researches. The equipment was sponsored by The International Amber Association and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The most interesting part of the collection for visitors is the one with educational character: “The life in an amber forest”. All the amber pieces which are the part of that exhibition were donated by amber manufactures from Gdańsk.
5. Hermitage, State Hermitage Museum – Hermitage is a Russian state museum in Saint Petersburg. It is located in five palaces near the Neva river. Its name derives from one of the winter palaces of Peter I. The main building of Hermitage is a baroque Winter Palace, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli and built for tsarina Elizabeth in 1754-1762. A huge exhibition of natural Baltic amber can be found in Hermitage. The goal of that exhibition is to share the knowledge about amber among its enthusiasts and wider audience, sharing its aesthetic and historical values. The oldest objects are dated back to the IV-III century BC and were found during excavations near Moscow. The amber collection in this museum is composed of 105 different objects. Some of them are complete sets of many different elements e.x. A chessboard with 32 figures or a game of flirt (a huge casket with four smaller ones inside, and in each of those smaller caskets located a dozen cards with engraved images). Only manufactured amber can be found in the collection. Objects which can be found in the collection are from the IV ~ III century BC and the XIX AD.