In the very north of the city on top of a small hill is a cemetery known as the Old Cemetery or Petropavlovskoe Cemetery. The main reason to visit the cemetery is to see the grave of Marina Tsvetaeva. Special permission was given to bury Tsvetaeva here as usually people who commit suicide cannot be buried in an Orthodox cemetery and even so she was buried on the very edge of the cemetery. Having been buried in the war years only a wooden cross was erected, which was later lost. After the war a proper gravestone was erected on the approximate site of her burial. Lyrics from her poem "You walk and look like me" are displayed next to her gravestone. The poem is about how people should act when they visit her grave.

Further back in the cemetery are two more places of interest: German and Japanese sections of the cemetery, where German, Hungarian and Japanese POWs who were sent to Yelabuga and died in the city are buried.