Lost Faberge Imperial Eggs: 6 Are Still Missing Right Now

Easter, 1885. A tsar hands his wife a plain white egg, the kind you'd glance at twice and forget.

She cracks it open. Inside sits a golden yolk. Inside the yolk, a golden hen. And inside the hen - a tiny ruby pendant and a miniature crown. Empress Maria Feodorovna was delighted. And Tsar Alexander III had just lit the fuse on one of the most extravagant traditions in history. One little Easter trick turned into a yearly ritual, broken only once by war, that ran right up until the dynasty itself collapsed into revolution.

By the time the House of Faberge made its very last egg, the workshop had crafted 50 of these jeweled marvels for two tsars. Forty-four are still here, glittering in museums and private vaults. Six are gone. And this isn't a fuzzy legend or a campfire tale. It's a precise, documented hole in one of the best-catalogued collections of art ever made. We know exactly what's missing. We just don't know where it went.

So what does the record actually say?

Between 1885 and 1916, the firm of Peter Carl Faberge delivered 50 Imperial Easter eggs to Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. Two more were dreamed up for Easter 1917 - the Karelian Birch Egg and the Constellation Egg - but the February Revolution crashed the party, and neither was ever formally handed to the imperial family. That pushes the total number of designed Imperial eggs to 52, which is exactly the kind of detail that trips people up.

Of the 50 that were actually delivered, 44 are accounted for, whole or in pieces. That leaves six genuinely missing. And here's the strange part. Every single one of the six belonged to the same woman - the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. The eggs Alexander III gave her, and later the ones Nicholas II gave his mother. This isn't a spooky coincidence cooked up by storytellers. It's a pattern that jumps right out of the surviving delivery records and inventories - not unlike how the Florentine Diamond traced back to a single Habsburg empress before it, too, disappeared.

The six that vanished, by their commonly accepted years:

• The 1886 Hen with Sapphire Pendant Egg
• The 1888 Cherub with Chariot Egg
• The 1889 Necessaire Egg
• The 1897 Mauve Egg (with its three miniature portraits)
• The 1902 Empire Nephrite Egg
• The 1903 Royal Danish Egg

There's a seventh that keeps crashing the list: the 1909 Alexander III Commemorative Egg, often counted among the lost too. A century of detective work has nudged some of these dates and descriptions around, which is why you'll see the number land on six or seven depending on who's counting and when they wrote it down.

How a gift becomes a ghost story

These were not trinkets. Each egg swallowed a full year of secret labor by master goldsmiths, enamellers, and lapidaries - and each one hid a surprise inside: an automaton that moved, a miniature carriage, a tiny portrait frame, a working model in miniature. People knew exactly what they were worth, even back then.

Then 1917 broke everything. Nicholas II abdicated, the Bolsheviks seized power, and the new government swallowed the Romanov possessions whole. The eggs - along with crates and crates of other imperial treasure - were hauled out of the palaces and into the Kremlin Armoury and the Anichkov Palace to be counted. Then came the desperate years. Cash-starved in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet state quietly sold off staggering amounts of this material abroad to scrape together hard currency, often through dealers in Western Europe and the United States. Many eggs slipped through the London firm Wartski and disappeared into private hands.

Revolution. Nationalization. Frantic inventories. A fire sale of priceless objects. It's the same kind of chaos that swallowed the Amber Room a few decades later, and it's a pattern that repeats across history's most famous lost treasures. Somewhere in that chaos, the six missing eggs slipped clean out of the record. Some may have been sold off quietly, sitting in a collection right now under the wrong name. Others may have met a worse fate - broken apart for their gold and stones, worth more as raw material to a desperate seller than as a fragile imperial curiosity. Melted down. Gone forever.

Or maybe not. Because one of these eggs came back.

The egg that nearly ended up in a melting pot

For decades, hunting for missing eggs meant flipping through catalogues and trading rumors. Then one find blew the whole game wide open.

The Third Imperial Egg, delivered to Maria Feodorovna in 1887, was one of the lost ones. Picture a ridged gold egg perched on an ornate tripod stand, cradling a lady's watch by Vacheron Constantin as its hidden surprise. It was last seen in a 1964 auction in New York - where it sold, with nobody recognizing what it was, for a few hundred dollars.

Then it dropped off the map, much like the Honjo Masamune, Japan's greatest sword, which vanished in the same kind of postwar confusion. Sometime later, a scrap-metal dealer in the American Midwest bought it at a flea market for around 14,000 dollars, planning to melt it down for the gold. Here's the catch: he couldn't find a single buyer willing to pay more than scrap value, so the thing just sat in his kitchen for years. Eventually, gnawing at the fear he'd overpaid for a lump of metal, he typed a description of the watch movement into a search engine. Up popped a 2011 article saying an unrecognized Faberge egg might still be out there somewhere. His stomach must have dropped through the floor. He contacted Wartski in London. The firm's director flew across the Atlantic, examined the egg, and confirmed it was real. Wartski bought it for a private collector. The egg that came within a breath of the melting pot? By the most credible reporting, worth around 33 million dollars.

Sit with that for a second. An object that survived a century of revolution, exile, and total indifference was hiding in plain sight on a kitchen counter, one bad day away from being liquid gold. That single story is the best argument we have that the other missing eggs might not be destroyed at all.

What we can still picture in our heads

Not all the missing eggs are blank squares. Some were photographed before the revolution swallowed them - which means we know exactly what we're hunting for.

• The 1889 Necessaire Egg was a jeweled etui - a little case packed with thirteen tiny manicure and toilette instruments. It was photographed at a 1949 London exhibition, then vanished all over again. That makes it one of the juiciest leads of all, because it proves the egg survived into the mid-twentieth century, alive and well in the West.
• The 1903 Royal Danish Egg lives on in an old black-and-white photograph. It was built to honor Maria Feodorovna's Danish roots, with miniatures of her parents and surprises tied to the Danish royal house.
• The 1909 Alexander III Commemorative Egg also survives in a single archival image.

These photographs are exactly why serious researchers treat the missing eggs as findable, not just lost. You can't really spot an object you've never laid eyes on. But one you have a picture of? That one you can recognize across a crowded room.

Where the survivors live now

To see the gaps clearly, it helps to know where the 44 surviving eggs ended up. The absences only sharpen against the full map.

• The Kremlin Armoury in Moscow holds ten Imperial eggs - the single biggest group, kept by the Soviet state instead of being sold off.
• The Faberge Museum in Saint Petersburg, founded by Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg, holds nine. Vekselberg snapped up the entire Forbes family collection in 2004, reportedly for just over 100 million dollars, and brought them home to Russia.
• The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond holds five - the largest public collection outside Russia.
• The rest are scattered across the British Royal Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and various private hands.

This is a well-mapped world. Which means the six empty slots in it are razor-sharp and precisely defined.

How the hunters actually hunt

Forget metal detectors and treasure maps with a big red X. The search for these eggs is archival detective work - patient, dusty, and brilliant. The leading reference researchers, including the scholars behind the detailed Faberge research database built up over decades, work from a small handful of clues.

• Period photographs. A clear pre-revolutionary image is the most powerful tool there is. The Necessaire Egg, the Royal Danish Egg, and the Alexander III Commemorative Egg are all known from such photos, giving investigators a precise visual target to match.
• Original invoices and court records. The Faberge firm and the imperial cabinet wrote down what was ordered, what materials went into it, and what each egg cost. Those notes describe surprises and dimensions exact enough to confirm a candidate - or rule it out cold.
• Auction and sale provenance. Trace an egg through the Soviet export sales of the 1920s and 1930s, then through Western auction houses, and you can pick up a trail that went cold decades ago. That's exactly how the Third Imperial Egg got reconnected to its 1964 New York sale.

What the hunters don't do is chase whispers of buried treasure chests. The realistic comeback is the one the Third Imperial Egg actually lived: an unrecognized object sitting in someone's home, finally identified when a person bothers to compare it to the documented record.

Sorting the facts from the daydreams

Let's be honest about what the evidence really supports - and what's just wishful thinking.

Documented fact: Fifty Imperial eggs were delivered. Forty-four survive. Six are missing. All six belonged to Maria Feodorovna. Several are known from period photographs. And one lost egg, the Third Imperial, was authenticated as recently as the 2010s after surfacing at an American flea market.

Reasonable inference: Because the missing eggs vanished during the Soviet export sales of the 1920s and 1930s, they most likely left Russia and slipped into private Western collections - where some may still be sitting, unrecognized, right now.

Pure speculation, and let's call it what it is: Claims that specific eggs are stashed in named bank vaults, or that some particular living collector secretly owns one, run on rumor, not documentation. Same goes for the periodic tabloid headlines screaming that an egg is about to be unveiled. The honest answer is that we don't know where the six are. We only know that one near-identical case proves they don't have to be gone forever.

The Faberge eggs survive as a mystery precisely because they're so well documented. We know exactly how many there were, who owned them, and what they looked like. The lost ones aren't phantoms. They're real objects, sitting somewhere right now, waiting - just like the Third Imperial Egg waited on that kitchen counter - for someone to finally look closely enough.

So the next time you pass a dusty flea-market table, take a second look. You never know what a tsar once held.

Sources & further reading

• Wikipedia - Faberge egg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faberg%C3%A9_egg
• Wartski - The Lost Third Imperial Easter Egg - https://wartski.com/the-lost-third-imperial-easter-egg/
• Wartski - The Missing Necessaire Egg - https://wartski.com/a-new-clue-in-the-hunt-for-the-missing-faberge-necessaire-egg/
• History Hit - The Mystery of the Missing Faberge Imperial Easter Eggs - https://www.historyhit.com/the-mystery-of-the-missing-faberge-imperial-easter-eggs/
• Mieks Faberge - Missing Imperial Easter Eggs - https://www.wintraecken.nl/mieks/faberge/eggs/missing.html

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