Raadi cemetery

Between 1771 and 1772, Russian empress Catherine the Great, issued an edict which decreed that from that point on no-one who died (regardless of their social standing or class origins) was to be buried in a church crypt or churchyard; all burials were to take place in the new cemeteries to be built throughout the entire Russian empire, which were to be located outside town boundaries.

These measures were intended to overcome the congestion of urban church crypts and graveyards, and were prompted by a number of outbreaks of highly contagious diseases linked to inadequate burial practices in urban areas, especially the black plague which had led to the Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771.

The St. Mary's (country) parish and Russian Orthodox Dormition congregation cemeteries were established north-west of the St. John's in the same year.

Burials at the cemetery were drastically reduced after the transfer of Baltic German population over to western Poland in late 1939.

[1] Burials at the cemetery continued on a much smaller scale until 1944, principally among those Baltic Germans who had refused Hitler's call to leave the region.