The trapped insects
Whole creatures forty million years old.
Diliff — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Andrzej Otrębski — CC BY-SA 4.0 · GraceKelly — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wincenty Dmochowski — Public domain
On the beaches of Palanga and Nida, especially after winter storms: it washes up with the seaweed along the tideline, and small pieces float in salt water — which is how you tell them from pebbles.
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"Baltic gold" in a count's palace inside a botanical park: the Amber Museum occupies the Tiškevičius family palace (1897) in Palanga and displays some twenty-eight thousand pieces of amber — the largest such collection in the world. Amber is pine resin fossilised forty million years ago, and the Baltic coast is its foremost source on earth: the sea throws it up after storms and people have picked it from the sand for thousands of years. The museum's most precious pieces are those that trapped whole insects and plants forty million years ago — an insect you see with your own eye exactly as it was the moment it fell into the resin. The palace itself and the surrounding botanical park (a hundred hectares laid out by the French architect Édouard André) are half the visit: paths, ponds and roses, and Birutė Hill on the shore with the legend of the mermaid who loved a fisherman until the sea god shattered her amber palace — the amber on the sand being its shards.
Whole creatures forty million years old.
A hundred hectares by a French garden architect.
Vytauto g. 17, Palanga