Peter the Great's
Chessboard
A museum-grade reconstruction of Peter I's personal travelling chess set — carved in mammoth ivory, bound in Italian leather and set with alexandrites and diamonds.
Hermitage, 1764
In a vitrine of the State Hermitage Museum lies a time-worn leather board marked for chess — one of the few surviving personal objects of Peter the Great. Reconstructed under the museum's curatorial guidance, each set is engraved with its crest and the date 1764.
The oldest material, worked without haste
First-grade mammoth ivory — some 10 kg to a set — is dried for eighteen months before a carver lifts a chisel to it; any sooner and it would crack. Each of the thirty-two figures is then turned and sculpted by hand in the Kholmogory tradition, the northern Russian art of virtuoso bone carving.
Jeweller's precision, in leather
Italian full-grain calf leather is fed with oils and waxes; sixty-four squares are coloured individually and stitched edge to edge. A heated brass roller then lays a single ribbon of gold foil in one pass — with no second chance.
A travelling set, made to unroll
True to the original, the board is supple — it folds and travels, a kingdom that can be carried. Laid flat, the leather field and its gold-tooled border frame the carved army in full.
382 stones — alexandrite & diamond
191 alexandrites and 191 natural diamonds. The imperial alexandrite — discovered in the Urals in 1834 and named for Alexander II — shifts colour between daylight and lamplight, revealing two sides of a single soul.
A case worthy of an emperor
The set rests in a Karelian-birch case finished in piano lacquer, its lid bearing the Hermitage crest in marquetry. Inside, a velvet tray cradles every figure in its own recess — edition N°00 enters the museum's permanent collection.
