A Lady in London

The Hill of Crosses could very well be renamed The Mound of Crosses. I didn’t even notice it as I drove down the main highway just to the left of it. Approaching the monument from the parking lot, I felt like I was walking towards a twig-covered grassy knoll rather than a popular tourist destination and the most important religious pilgrimage site in the Baltics.

Perspective changes everything, though. As I got closer to the hill it began to look larger and more impressive, and I could start to make out the outlines of some of the individual crosses that give the site its name.

As the path came to an end in front of the hill, I stopped for a minute to take in the scene. There were crosses of every size and design smothering the hill and spilling down the sides into the grass below. Hundreds of thousands of them, in every shape and color, were arranged haphazardly around the mound. Punctuated only by the odd statue of Jesus or thin navigational footpath, big crosses, small crosses, and crosses bearing crosses covered every inch of land and grew well up into the sky.

Originally a place of ancestor worship, the advent of Christianity converted the Hill of Crosses into a place of religious remembrance for the deceased. During the communist period, the anti-religious Soviets made a habit of bulldozing the hill and removing its religious paraphernalia. Undaunted, the good people of rural Lithuania kept building it back up again. After the country regained its independence, the Hill of Crosses was allowed to flourish, expanding to its current grandiose proportions and even warranting a visit from the last Pope.

I walked up the stairs, amazed at the sheer number of crosses and a bit unnerved by the bizarre nature of this out-of-the-way religious site. Everywhere there were crosses, some homemade, some the uniform kind on display in the parking lot gift shop. Each one had a name and date written somewhere on it, either in hastily employed Sharpie or finely engraved silver. From tiny mass-produced wooden crosses to massive metal crucifixes constructed out of Soviet-era pipes, the jumble of wood and steel were awe-inspiring, even if the awe wasn’t of the religious kind.

After a leisurely ramble up the hill and along the overflow area to the sides, I walked back down the path that led away from the site. Sure enough, even from a close distance the hill was again almost unnoticeable. These days the Lithuanians might welcome the hill as an analogy for their entire country, as their Russian neighbors seem ever more inclined bulldoze their way back into former Soviet territories that draw too much attention to themselves.