The history of the Volkovsky cemetery dates back to 1756. Then, at the suggestion of Sovereign Elizabeth Petrovna, the city cemetery at the Church of St. John the Baptist, located in the Yamskaya Sloboda, existing since 1710, was closed. Instead, by decree of the Senate, the Volkovsky cemetery was created.
The new necropolis did not receive its name immediately. According to legend, over time it was called by local residents who claimed that many wolves roamed this place. Some storytellers did not hesitate to invent stories about corpses eaten by greedy or poor relatives left unburied. And such situations, frankly, in the 18-19th century were not such a rare occurrence.
Despite the fact that the Volkovsky cemetery was considered very poor from the very beginning of its existence, more and more people were buried on its territory. Burial places 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 notifying the authorities of the cemetery.
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. Volkovsky cemetery in its entire history had several wooden, and then made of stone temples. One of the first, which, unfortunately, has not survived to the present day, is the Resurrection Church. A single-throne wooden temple with a stone foundation was laid in 1756 simultaneously with the opening of the necropolis. Volkovsky cemetery grew without any twists and turns, until a revolution broke out in Russia. She dramatically changed the appearance of the main St. Petersburg burial place. In the 1920s and 1930s, churches were demolished and closed on its territory, tombs were ruined and monuments to famous nobles were destroyed, which by that time a lot 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 Holy Savior were designated as a warehouse. Under the Soviet Union, the cemetery is very lost in its territory, many monuments and tombstones are forever lost.
Officially, they have not buried here since 1933, and the necropolis itself has the status of a museum. But as an exception, at the oldest cemetery in St. Petersburg even today they betray to the burial of famous people or those local residents who positively “noted” in the history of the city. At one time, the Volkovsky cemetery (St. Petersburg) became the resting place of Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Turgenev, Saltykov-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. Volkovskoe 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 still it is considered valid.
