"Eight hundred years ago, in Kiev, a master goldsmith admired for the last time the wondrous necklace that he had only just forged, intended to adorn the neck of a Kievian beauty now lost in the mists of time, before handing it over to its customer. A century and a half later the precious adornment was hidden in the rampart of the St Michael Gold-Topped Monastery, beyond which the wild cries of the Mongol hordes could already be heard. It lay there for some six hundred and fifty years, awaiting modern archaeologists, before finding its way into the museum. Now the work of the Russian master delights us with its unearthly beauty and masterful talent. Such was the fate, in short, of just one of the more than two hundred works on show at the current exhibition. Each of them has their own fates, seen their own events and dramas. Take for example the golden grivna, an amulet called to preserve the life and then the eternal rest of Prince Vladimir Monomakh. How it did it,...