National Museum of History of Azerbaijan

When the son of a shoemaker struck oil in 1877, Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev became one of the richest men in the Russian Empire almost overnight. He built a palace so opulent that nine kilograms of gold were used just to inscribe Quranic verses on the Oriental Hall’s ceiling. Two months after the Red Army confiscated his mansion in 1920, it became a state museum, but Soviet officials weren’t fans of floral wallpaper, painting over the “bourgeois remains” with four layers of white paint.

The paint job didn’t hold up as well as the gold. Restorers stripping the walls in 2000 found the original decoration underneath, pigment made from finely ground eggshell, a technique borrowed from Byzantine icon painters, still vivid after a century while the Soviet-era whitewash had simply sat on top, unbothered and unconvincing. Taghiyev never saw any of this. He was exiled to his summer house not long after the confiscation and died in 1924, leaving behind a mansion that would spend the next several decades getting split between a history museum and, at one point, the offices of the Azerbaijan SSR’s Council of People’s Commissars. The gold stayed. The paperwork didn’t.