This dark steely grey stone is a cushion cut, 67 carat diamond. The Black Orlov has been exhibited at several exhibitions including the State Fair of Texas in 1964, The Carnegie Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.
Known as the Black Orlov or The Eye of Brahma, the jewel's curse allegedly began when it was removed from a Hindu shrine in southern India and then claimed to be responsible for the violent deaths of two Russian princesses.
Legend tells of a monk removing the original rough 195-carat diamond from the eye of the Idol of Brahma at a shrine near Pondicherry, India. Some say that black is a bad luck color for Hindus and they would never have put a black stone on an idol. Research shows that in the Hindu belief of the 3 eyes - one is the sun and one is the moon, on opposite sides of the head. The sun represents the light and the moon, the dark. So it may have been that a black diamond would have been used for the "moon eye."
This sacrilege allegedly cursed all future owners of the precious stone to a violent death.
In 1947 Princess Nadia Vyegin-Orlov and Princess Leonila Galitsine-Bariatinsky - both former owners of the Black Orlov - leapt to their deaths in apparent suicides. Fifteen years earlier, J.W. Paris, the diamond dealer who imported the stone to the USA, had jumped to his death from one of New York's tallest buildings shortly after concluding the sale of the jewel.
In an attempt to break the curse, the diamond was re-cut into three separate gems and has since been owned by a succession of private owners, all of whom seem to have escaped the curse. The 67.5-carat Black Orlov is set in a 108-diamond brooch suspended from a 124-diamond necklace.