Muzeum Bursztynu, Gdańsk

Muzeum Bursztynu occupies the Great Mill, which became its new home on the twenty-fourth of July twenty twenty-one. This museum of craft was created in two thousand as part of the Museum of Gdańsk, and it follows amber’s story alongside the history of Polish amber working. Earlier, it welcomed visitors in the Prison Tower on the Royal Route, opening there on the twenty-eighth of June two thousand six.

More than a million people had visited before the move. The galleries now offer a thousand square metres for displays. The natural-history section explores the material’s past, extraction, making, qualities, and creatures preserved within it; the art section follows amber through earlier eras and into contemporary creative work.

A remarkable specimen holds a young lizard preserved for about forty million years. Found on the beach at Stogi in nineteen ninety-seven, it is Poland’s only lizard inclusion and only the second such lizard discovered in Baltic amber. The collection also includes its largest amber mass: a sixty-eight-kilogram piece from Sumatra. That range, from an ancient creature caught in resin to a monumental raw lump, gives this museum its particular sense of scale.