A Hundred Million Crosses! Siauliai - Lithuania (19/7/06 - Day 5)

After Riga, I continued south towards the country of Lithuania, supposively the most beautiful country and the country famous for its "Weapons of Mass Attractions", as according to the Lonely Planet Eastern Europe guide. True that, Lithuania really has so much to see.

During the morning, after waving goodbye to the Aussie friend I met in the hostel (while he was still half-asleeped), I headed to the Riga bus station and caught the next bus towards Siauliai, which is just 30km from the Lithuania/Latvia border. The bus that I took destined for the Kaliningrad region of Russia, and most of the bus passengers are mostly Russians heading home to Kaliningrad. Again, I was the only Asian looking character in the whole bus.

Within 1 hours or so, the bus arrived at the Latvia/Lithuania border, and passport checks are routine. Again, holding a EU passport I was pretty much waved through. About an hour later, the bus make a brief stop at Siauliai and here I got off the bus.

From Siauliai to the Hills of Crosses, one has to take another bus back north for about 10km, and then it was another 2km walk towards the site. The buses weren't very frequent and as a result, in order for me to catch the next bus, I had to grab a fast sandwich at the cafe shop, which also leaves me enough time to dash to the bank across the road to change some of my euros into Lithuanian Litas.

The signage to the Hill of Crosses weren't very obvious, but by asking the driver I knew where to get off. After getting off the bus, I had this long walk through a lonely countryside road that eventually leads to the site. My first impression was like, "Wow!" It was really an unusual site when you see crosses, all of different sizes, all stood up in a really small hill. It was close to impossible to count all the crosses, but could estimates at least a hundred thousand, or even a million crosses in the site. Just estimate how many tourists visit the Hill of Crosses a day, and count on every tourist putting up a small crosses there and you can understand how many crosses are added onto the hill per day, per month or per year.

It is amazing to think how this phenomenon starts, but it would be interesting to know more about the history of the site, at least to make this phenomenon make sense. During the 19th century when Lithuanian were gathered to rebell against the Russians, many families could not locate the bodies of those who are dead. As a result, they started to put up crosses onto this small hill so to commemorate for the death. After all these years, Lithuania had been independence and had been under Soviet rules, and during those times, the Hill of Crosses became a place for people to pray for peace, for the country as well as for those who has lost their loved ones during the wars. Despite many times during the centuries the Hill of Crosses were being bulldozed, it was built up again and more crosses were being put there.

Nowadays, the Hill of Crosses is under no one's jurisdiction, and people are free to visit and to plant their own crosses there. Before I left the site, I also bought a small cross, wrote my own name (as well as a Bible verse in Chinese) and plant it on the site, contributing one of the million more crosses on the hill.

I stayed for around 2 hours there and walked the whole way back to the main road and caught the bus back to Siauliai. There I had two hours to spare before my next train towards the next destination, Klaipeda.

More photos of Siauliai and the Hill of Crosses: http://lonelytraveller01.multiply.com/photos/album/8

(Pic Caption: Top: Me at the Hill of Crosses. Middle: Crosses of various sizes hanging in the site. Bottom: My cross being planted at the midst of the crosses.)