Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery

Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, in the northeast of Saint Petersburg, is the largest memorial cemetery in the world dedicated to the victims of the Second World War and one of the principal sites of remembrance for the Siege of Leningrad. Before the revolution, a modest village cemetery of Piskaryovka stood here, and in 1939–1940 those who died in the Soviet–Finnish War were buried on this site. From 1942, the site became the main location for the mass burial of the residents and defenders of the besieged city who had died.

The greatest number of deaths occurred during the terrible winter of 1941–1942: on a single day, 15 February 1942, more than eight thousand bodies were brought to the cemetery for burial. In total, from December 1941 to June 1942, more than 370,000 people were buried here. Today, 186 mass graves and six thousand individual burials hold the remains of more than 470,000 residents of Leningrad and nearly 76,000 service members, of whom more than eight thousand remain unidentified.

A competition for the memorial's design was announced as early as February 1945, but work on it stalled in the late 1940s owing to the political repressions of the so-called "Leningrad Affair," and resumed only in 1956. The memorial complex, covering more than 26 hectares, was created by the architects Alexander Vasilyev and Yevgeny Levinson, and its formal opening took place on 9 May 1960, on the fifteenth anniversary of Victory Day, when a torch was brought from the Field of Mars to light the Eternal Flame.

The centerpiece of the architectural and sculptural ensemble is a six-meter bronze statue, "Motherland," by the sculptors Vera Isayeva and Robert Taurit, complemented by a mourning stele with bas-reliefs depicting episodes from the life and struggle of the besieged city. A solemn main avenue, 480 meters long, leads from the Eternal Flame to the monument, and on the granite wall behind the statue are carved the famous lines of the poet Olga Berggolts stating that no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten. Two pavilions at the entrance to the cemetery house a museum, which holds, among other things, a copy of the diary of the Leningrad schoolgirl Tanya Savicheva, who lost her entire family during the siege. Along the cemetery's eastern boundary runs the Avenue of Remembrance, lined with memorial plaques from Russian and foreign cities and organizations whose residents worked for the besieged Leningrad.

Piskaryovskoye Cemetery remains a site of mass pilgrimage and ceremonies on days of remembrance, symbolizing both the scale of the tragedy of the siege and the resilience of its defenders.