Palanga amber

Twenty-eight thousand pieces of amber, and about fifteen thousand of them have something trapped inside.

The Palanga Amber Museum stands near the Baltic Sea in Palanga, Lithuania, as a branch of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. It occupies the restored Tiskevicius palace and is surrounded by the Palanga Botanical Garden. Of its roughly 28,000 pieces of amber, about 15,000 hold inclusions of insects, spiders or plants, and around 4,500 pieces are on display, many of them worked into artwork and jewellery.

The building has a pedigree of its own. Writing for the Lithuanian museums journal, the museum's chief museologist Antanas Tranyzas records that the museum was established on 3 August 1963 in the manor of Count Feliksas Tiskevicius, who lived from 1865 to 1932. The manor was designed by the German architect Franz Schwechten and built in 1897, and the botanical gardens around it were laid out by the landscape architect Edouard Francois Andre. The exposition runs through fifteen rooms and covers how amber forms, how it is processed, what it is used for and the range of shapes it takes. Something like eight million people have walked through it.

This coast has been trading amber since prehistory, along the routes collectively called the Amber Road. Neolithic amber artifacts were found at nearby Juodkrante in the 19th century, and they disappeared during the 20th, which is its own small tragedy.

The stone is woven through Lithuanian mythology and folklore. In the legend of Jurate and Kastytis, the sea goddess Jurate lives in an undersea palace made of amber, and Perkunas, the god of thunder, shatters it. The fragments washing up on the beaches here are said to be what is left of it.

Walk the tideline after a storm and you may find some yourself. Then go and look at what fifteen thousand inclusions look like in one room.