The Louvre museum’s Apollo gallery, where thieves pulled off one of the boldest eight-minute museum heists in years, is open to the public again. However, with a twist as there’s nothing left to steal now.
The Apollo Gallery welcomed visitors back on Wednesday, July 22, nine months after four masked thieves broke in and stole France’s crown jewels in broad daylight.
The museum has now removed everything from the room, even the empty display cases and only left the gilded ceilings, frescoes and the sculpted walls. The gallery has been returned to its original form just like it was three and a half centuries ago (in 1700s). At that time, the gallery served as a ceremonial hall for Louis XIV, which he used for walking through and looking up, not for cases full of diamonds.
In an interview with Le Parisien, the President-Director of the Louvre Museum, Christophe Leribault, said the jewels which survived will be transferred to a new vault somewhere in the museum, announcing that they are not coming back into the Apollo gallery.
He described the new location of jewels as “windowless, secure, nothing like the setup that let four men in on scooters.”
On October 19 last year, the thieves used a lift mounted on a truck to reach a window on the first floor, cut through the glass, and were in and out with eight pieces in under eight minutes.
Among what they took: a tiara that belonged to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, along with jewelry tied to other French queens going back generations.
All of it added up to somewhere around 88 million euros, or about $102 million.
Only one piece ever turned up again. Eugénie’s crown was found outside the museum, apparently dropped by the thieves as they fled. Everything else is still missing, and so are the men who took it.
2026-07-23 01:08:00
