Kopli cemetery

The Kopli cemetery (Friedhof von Ziegelskoppel or Kirchhof von Ziegelskoppel; Kopli kalmistu) was Estonia's largest Lutheran Baltic German cemetery, located in the suburb of Kopli in Tallinn. It contained thousands of graves of prominent citizens of Tallinn and stood from 1774 to shortly after World War II, when it was completely flattened and destroyed by the Soviet occupation authorities governing the country at the time. The former cemetery is now a public park. Between 1771 and 1772, Catherine the Great, empress of the Russian Empire, 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 new cemeteries to be built throughout Russia, 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 1771 Plague Riot in Moscow. The cemetery at Kopli was founded in 1774 on the outskirts of Tallinn. It was divided into two sections: the western part was used for the deceased belonging to the St. Nicholas' Church parish, while the eastern part was reserved for those of the St. Olaf's Church parish. The cemetery served as a burial ground for over 170 years for almost all Baltic Germans who died in the city between 1774 and 1944. In 1939, it contained thousands of well-kept graves of many prominent citizens of Tallinn. Since 1921, on the southern outskirts of the cemetery, there was a burial place for the lower ranks and officers of the russian Northwestern Army, who died in the typhoid hospitals after the end of the Russian Civil War and Estonian War of Independence. Since 1936, the St. George Chapel by the architect A.I. Vladovsky has stood on the territory of the cemetery, which was destroyed in Soviet times and restored in 2022.