Mõigu Cemetery

Containing numerous graves, it stood for over 170 years from 1774 to shortly after World War II when it was completely flattened and destroyed by the Soviet occupation authorities governing the country at that time.

Between 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.

Gravestones were used to build walls along the ports and sidewalks in other parts of the city and no trace of the cemetery was left standing.

The Soviet forces, in a coordinated effort to remove all traces of the past, non-ethnic Russian inhabitants of Tallinn also destroyed two other 16th and 18th century cemeteries in the city, in the suburbs of Kopli and Kalamaja which belonged to the ethnic Estonian and Baltic German communities.

[citation needed] The only surviving evidence of those who were interred there consists of the parish registers of burials and some old detailed maps of the area in the Tallinn city archives.