Vvedenskoye Cemetery is a historic cemetery in the Lefortovo District of Moscow in Russia. Until 1918 it was mainly a burial ground for the Catholic and Protestant communities of the city, principally ethnic Germans, and thus it was also called the German Cemetery. After 1918 the cemetery was secularized and accepted the dead of all confessions, including the Orthodox clergy. Throughout its history it has also been extensively used as a military cemetery. It is located on a 20 hectare lot between Gospitalny Val Street and Nalichnaya Street at.
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, 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 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, 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 a 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.
Upon secularization in 1918, new non-denominational graves gradually took over the older, untended, grave sites. As a result, today the historical graves are scattered among the majority of post-1918 graves. During World War II, many soldiers who died in the nearby Lefortovo hospitals were buried here including 50 Heroes of the Soviet Union among whom was Stepan Kretov, and the deceased French pilots from the Normandie-Niemen regiment. The latters' remains were relocated to France in the 1950s, however one tomb of Unknown French Pilot, killed in action in July 1943, is still preserved. The cemetery still allows burials; some historical family lots continue to date since early 19th century. In some instances, like the Pikersgills descending from Englishman John Pickersgill of Howgrave in Yorkshire, original lots were too small to accommodate future generations, and were eventually re-established on different sites.
