In Lithuania there is a high-speed road that leads north to the capital of neighboring Latvia, Riga. From an initial stretch of the road, which starts from the city of Šiauliai, looking east one can see a rather anonymous panorama, with expanses grassy areas, trees and a hillock. For about two centuries, Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian people have been going on pilgrimage to that hill and planting a cross, or carrying a votive statuette, a rosary, an object considered sacred. Above all, however, crosses, which have become so dense over the centuries that the hill looks like a kind of enormous – and somewhat disturbing – pincushion. In the 1990s it was estimated that there were over 50 thousand, in the mid-2000s around 100 thousand.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The original reason why this tradition began is not clear. On the site of the Lithuanian Catholic Church dedicated to the Hill of Crosses (Kryžių Kalnas in Lithuanian) the archbishop of Šiauliai Eugenijus Bartulis writes that the first written evidence of the crosses in that place dates back to 1850, but in all probability there were at least twenty years Before. In 1831 in Poland and neighboring countries there was a rebellion against the Russian Tsarist Empire, which controlled a large part of Lithuanian territory. During that revolt there were several dead also in Lithuania, but the Lithuanians were prevented from honoring and burying them: therefore, as a reaction, they began to accumulate crosses on that hill as a symbolic place.
The same thing happened thirty years later, when there was a new uprising against the tsarist empire. In a few decades the hill assumed a certain importance for Lithuanian culture and identity, and at the beginning of the twentieth century it became a de facto sacred place, where masses were celebrated and pilgrimages were made. But an even deeper and more important meaning was given to it in the second half of the twentieth century, when the Lithuanian territory passed from the control of the Tsars to that of the Soviet Union.
Marxist-Leninist doctrine devalued the importance of religion in society, because, summed up, it was seen as an organic element in the rule of the bourgeoisie that the revolution wanted to overthrow. Vladimir Lenin, the first and most important Soviet communist leader, wrote that religion “is a spiritual brandy, in which the slaves of capital drown their human personality and their claims to a life in some measure worthy of men”. Lenin’s writings did not promote an active contrast to religion, but rather a downsizing, an invitation to live it only in a private and not public form.
But in a short time the Soviet regime, especially under Stalin, turned this downsizing into repression and consequently a place like the Hill of Crosses could not be tolerated, also because for Lithuanians it had become a symbol of resistance.
In 1961 there was a first intervention against the site. The wooden crosses were destroyed and burned, the metal ones used as salvage material and the stone ones split and buried. This did not dissuade the Lithuanians from the tradition, so the Soviets tried again, and again and again, even with bulldozers, flattening the hillock and the planted crosses. If the first few times the demolitions had been done in secret, at night, between 1973 and 1975 hundreds of crosses were destroyed in broad daylight. But since they didn’t stop reappearing even like this, the Soviets tried other methods: once fake epidemics were announced in the area to prevent people from going out and planting crosses; another time, between 1978 and 1979, the area was flooded to try to make it unusable. But from the next day, whether there was water or other impediments, the crosses reappeared.
In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was weakened and nearing its end, the cult of the Hill of Crosses was able to expand freely. The site also became famous outside the country in 1993, when there was a visit by Pope John Paul II, who was Polish and who had actively supported the opposition to the communist regime in his own country in the 1980s. On that occasion, the pope spoke to the faithful present and said: «Sons and daughters of your homeland have brought up this hill crosses similar to that of Golgotha, which witnessed the death of our Savior. Thus people declared their sincere belief that their deceased brothers and sisters have found eternity. (…). The cross is a symbol of eternal life in God.”
Pope John Paul II at the Hill of Crosses (L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO – Photo Service/via ANSA)
Today the Hill of Crosses is the object of visits and pilgrimages by tourists, but it retains a special meaning for Lithuanians: they also go there after celebrating significant events, such as a wedding, or to pray in a particularly important and delicate moment.
In 2019 a Chinese woman went to the hill to remove and throw away a cross that had been planted in support of the pro-democracy demonstrations that were taking place in Hong Kong at the time. The woman told everything in a video on Instagram and even the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius intervened, who defined the gesture as a “shameful act of vandalism”.
