During the plague which ravaged Finland in 1710-11, its victims were not allowed to be buried on consecrated land. In Kokkola a cemetery for the plague victims was set up outside the city and surrounded by a stone wall. Katarina cemetery is one of the unique cemeteries in Scandinavia. It was founded in the 1770s in the vicinity of the old plague cemetery. Funerary rites were very different from now. The bodies of those who died during the winter were kept in charnel houses until they could be buried in the spring when the ground thawed.
On the border of the cemetery there is a memorial to those who remained in Karelia (Veikko Leppänen 1958).
The Old Petrol Station