Vvedenskoye Cemetery - Origins

Origins

Between late 1771 and 1772, Catherine the Great, empress of the Russian Empire, issued an edict which decreed that, from that point on, any person who died (regardless of their 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 measues was overcrowding in church crypts and graveyards. However the true deciding factor which lead 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 black plague which had led to the Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771.

When the Vvedenskoye cemetery was established in the early 1770s, an older, 16th century German cemetery was incorporated into it. This older cemetery was located near German Quarter (on the opposite bank of Yauza River), which had traditionally served the Lutheran community and other western Christian denominations. In addition to German community, the cemetery tended to substantial English, Polish and Italian populations.

Unusual for Russian cemeteries, some graves, notably of Polish gentry, were set up as standalone crypts with walk-in chapels; these are now in dilapidated state. Most graves, however, are plain headstones or crosses; traditional Russian sarcophagus-styled tombs of this period are rare and usually belong to Orthodox dead, originally buried elsewhere and relocated to Vvedenskoe later.