Volkovskoe cemetery - history and modernity

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:44

The history of the Volkovsky cemetery dates back to 1756. Then, at the suggestion of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the city cemetery at the Church of John the Baptist, which had existed since 1710, located in the Yamskaya Sloboda, was closed. Instead, by decree of the Senate, the Volkovskoye cemetery was created.

The new necropolis did not get its name right away. As the legend says, over time, it was nicknamed by the locals, who claimed that many wolves roam this place. Some storytellers were not shy about making up stories about corpses that were eaten and left unburied by greedy or poor relatives. And such situations, frankly, in the 18-19th century were not such a rare occurrence.

Despite the fact that the Volkovskoye cemetery was considered very poor from the very beginning of its existence, more and more people were buried on its territory. Places for burial were given almost or completely for nothing. There was no burial order. Both state institutions and private individuals buried their dead where they bothered to dig a grave without putting it infame cemetery authorities.

It, in turn, despite the obvious negligence in terms of control over the functioning of the necropolis, attached great importance to the construction of churches on its territory. Volkovskoe cemetery throughout its history had several wooden, and then made of stone temples. One of the first, which, unfortunately, has not survived to this day, is the Church of the Resurrection. The single- altar wooden temple with a stone foundation was founded in 1756 simultaneously with the opening of the necropolis. The Volkovskoye cemetery grew without much ups and downs until the revolution broke out in Russia. She dramatically changed the appearance of the main St. Petersburg burial site. In the 1920s and 1930s, churches were demolished and closed on its territory, tombs were plundered and monuments to famous nobles were destroyed, by that time a lot of them had already been buried in the cemetery. The so-called "five-year plan of godlessness", which began in 1932, destroyed the All Saints and Assumption churches of the necropolis, and in 1935 the premises of the Church of the Savior Not Made by Hands were assigned as a warehouse. Under the Soviet Union, the cemetery was very lost in its territory, many monuments and tombstones were lost forever.

Officially, they have not been buried here since 1933, and the necropolis itself has the status of a museum. But as an exception, in the oldest cemetery in St. Petersburg, famous people or those local residents who have been positively “marked” in the history of the city are still buried today. In my timeVolkovskoye Cemetery (St. Petersburg) became the resting place of Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Turgenev, S altykov-Shchedrin, Mendeleev, Pavlov and many other representatives of the intelligentsia, science and medicine.

By the way, in Russia there is another cemetery with the same name. Volkovskoye cemetery (Mytishchi) is located thirty kilometers from the capital. It is not as old as St. Petersburg. It was opened in the 30s of the last century, and it is still considered valid.