The history of the Volkov cemetery dates back to 1756. Then, at the suggestion of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the city cemetery existing in 1710 at the Church of St. John the Baptist, located in Yamskaya Sloboda, was closed. Instead, a Volkov cemetery was created by a decree of the senate.
The new necropolis got its name not immediately. As the legend says, so it was eventually nicknamed by the locals, who claimed that many wolves wandered around this place. Some of the storytellers did not hesitate to invent stories about eaten corpses that greedy or poor relatives left unburied. And such situations, frankly, in the 18-19 century were not so rare.
Despite the fact that the Volkov cemetery from the very beginning of its existence was considered very poor, more and more people were buried on its territory. Places for burial were given almost or completely for nothing. There was no order of burial. Both state institutions and individuals buried their dead where they bothered to dig a grave without informing the authorities of the cemetery.
It, in turn, despite the obvious negligence in terms of control over the functioning of the necropolis, great importance attached to the construction of churches on its territory. Volkovskoe cemetery for all its history had several wooden, and then made of stone churches. One of the first, which, unfortunately, has not survived to this day - the Resurrection Church. A single-table wooden church with a stone foundation was laid in 1756 at the same time as the opening of the necropolis. The Volkov cemetery grew without any major upheavals 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 it, ruined tombs and destroyed monuments to famous noblemen, who by that time had already buried a lot in the cemetery. The so-called "Five-Year Plan of Atheism", which began in 1932, destroyed the All-Svyatsky and the Assumption Church of the Necropolis, and in 1935 the building of the Church of the Savior of the Holy Face was identified as a warehouse. Under the Soviet Union, the cemetery is very lost in its territory, many monuments and tombstones are forever lost.
Officially, they do not bury it here since 1933, and the necropolis itself has the status of a museum. But as an exception, in the oldest cemetery in St. Petersburg, even today, people are buried in the city or in the town's history. At one time 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 it is still considered to be in force.