Volkovo Cemetery

Volkovo Cemetery
Volkovo Cemetery
	Saint Job at Volkovskoe cemetery.
Details
Established	1773
Location	Saint Petersburg
Country	Russia
Coordinates	59°54′07″N 30°21′54″E / 59.902°N 30.365°E
Type	Public
Style	Christian (non-Orthodox)
No. of interments	> 100,000
Find a Grave	Volkovo Cemetery

The Volkovo Cemetery (also Volkovskoe) (

Germans in Russia

. It is estimated that over 100,000 people have been buried at this cemetery since 1773.

Origins 1770–1773

Between late 1771 and 1772,

Russian empire, issued an edict which decreed that, from that point on, any person who died (regardless of social standing or class origins) no longer had the right to be buried within church crypts or adjacent churchyards

. New cemeteries had to be built across the entire Russian Empire and from then on they all had to be located outside city limits.

One of the main motivations behind these measures was overcrowding in church crypts and graveyards. However, the true deciding factor which led to the new laws being enforced on such a mass scale across the entire Russian empire was to avoid further outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, especially the

Plague Riot

in Moscow in 1771.

The Volkovo cemetery was founded in 1773. The first person to be buried in this cemetery was Johann Gebhard Brethfeld, a merchant in Saint Petersburg.

Current research

The person who has done the most work in investigating the history of the cemetery is Dr. Benedikt Böhm in Saint Petersburg. As of 2007, Dr. Böhm and published four volumes on the history of the cemetery, each of which contain extensive lists of names of those people who were buried there between 1773 and 1936. His 2 main sources for these publications are as follows:

The original
parish registers
of burials at the cemetery kept in the states archives in Saint Petersburg.
Countless personal visits to the cemetery itself since 1989 in which he compiled an inventory of all those graves which are still standing today complete with photographs of each
gravestone
.