Russian Cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

Russian Cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, established in the 1920s around a Russian Orthodox charity home, became the main burial ground of the émigré community that fled the 1917 Revolution. In a calm, wooded setting south of Paris, Cyrillic inscriptions and Orthodox crosses map a shared life of exile, faith, and remembrance. Famous graves—among them Rudolf Nureyev’s mosaic tomb (1996) and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s monument—have made the cemetery a quietly iconic repository of Russian cultural memory in France.