On January 10 last year, a body in a scuba-diving suit was found washed up on the Lithuanian shore. It was the corpse of a 21-year-old man named Kirill, who had gone missing nine days earlier when diving for amber — so called “Baltic gold”— more than 60 miles away, off the coast of Kaliningrad.
Kirill’s death was just the first of at least nine such fatal accidents in 2018, the result of a perilous pursuit for the gem that has nevertheless become a livelihood for thousands of young men in Kaliningrad, the Russian outpost.
“It is dangerous, but what are we to do? It’s either this, or it’s going back to the army for 25,000 roubles [$380] a month,” says amber-diver Nikita, 22, on the beach at Yantarny, the coastal town in Kaliningrad close to where much of the amber is found.