The Hill of Crosses, and the faith that kept being put back

From a distance, the Hill of Crosses does not look like much: a low mound in flat farmland, a few kilometres north of the Lithuanian town of Šiauliai. As you come closer, it seems to shimmer. The whole hill is covered in crosses, so densely that they lean on each other: tall carved wooden crosses, small metal ones, crucifixes, statues of the Virgin, and countless tiny crosses and rosaries hanging from the larger ones, clicking and rattling in the wind. Nobody knows exactly how many there are, but estimates run well beyond a hundred thousand.

It is one of the most extraordinary sights in the Baltic, and one of the most moving.

Where it began

The hill was once the site of a wooden fort, and its history as a place of crosses is uncertain. The first crosses are usually linked to the uprisings of 1831 and 1863 against Russian rule, when families who could not recover the bodies of rebels killed or deported by the Russian authorities placed crosses on the hill in their memory. Over the following decades, people came to leave crosses for all kinds of reasons: in thanks for a recovery, in memory of someone lost, in prayer for a family.

Lithuania has a long tradition of cross-crafting. Its carved wooden crosses, often topped with small roofs, suns and other decoration, are a folk art in their own right, and UNESCO recognises the craft as part of the world's intangible heritage.

One figure appears again and again among the crosses: the Rūpintojėlis, a small carved figure of Christ seated with his head resting on one hand, lost in thought or grief. It is one of the commonest images in Lithuanian folk sculpture, found on roadside shrines and in farmhouse corners as well as on the hill, and it has come to be seen as a kind of national symbol, the worried one, keeping watch over the country.

The hill that would not stay empty

After the Second World War, Lithuania was absorbed into the Soviet Union, and religion was discouraged and often persecuted. The Hill of Crosses became a quiet form of resistance: leaving a cross there was a statement of faith and of Lithuanian identity at a time when both were suppressed.

The authorities tried to remove it. In 1961 the crosses were bulldozed, burned or melted down, and the hill was levelled. People came back, often at night, and planted new ones. Over the following years the hill was cleared again several times, and there were attempts to stop people reaching it, but each time it was cleared, the crosses returned. By the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union weakened, the authorities gave up, and the hill became a national symbol.

In 1993, two years after Lithuania regained its independence, Pope John Paul II visited the hill and celebrated Mass there, and he later sent a crucifix of his own. A Franciscan friary was built nearby, whose large window behind the altar looks out onto the hill.

Visiting

The hill is open at all times and free to visit. There is a small visitor centre and a car park, and a path leads up and over it between the crosses. Many visitors bring a cross to leave, and they can be bought at the stalls nearby. It is best seen early in the morning or late in the day, when the light is low and the coach parties have gone, and when the sound of the crosses in the wind is all there is.

The tours

Explore Worldwide's Baltic Capital Cities, seven nights, stops at the Hill of Crosses on the way north from Vilnius, Trakai and Kaunas to Riga, Pärnu and Tallinn. It runs from spring to autumn and in December.

Explore's Upgraded: The Baltic States and Poland, eleven nights, also stops there, in a longer journey that runs from Tallinn and Riga to Vilnius, then through the Masurian lakes of north-eastern Poland, with the Wolf's Lair and the church at Święta Lipka, to Warsaw and Kraków. It runs from May to September.

The hill is a place to spend an hour, not a day, but it tends to be the hour people remember best from a journey through the Baltic states.