Around 11km outside the city of Siauliai in northern Lithuania, an old, earthen mound hunches under the weight of thousands of crosses. As the wind blows across the fields of rural Siauliai County, ornate rosaries clink against metal and wooden crucifixes, filling the air with eerie chimes.
Known as the Hill of Crosses, the mound’s history is a complex narrative of wars and uprisings. Ancient legends, mysterious visions and accounts of haunting surround the hill, and its exact origins remain a mystery to this day.
Yet not every cross has been left by an optimistic pilgrim – some are instead reminders of quiet rebellion. After surviving medieval sieges by the invading German crusaders and 19th-Century uprisings by Lithuanians against Russian Tsar Alexander II, the Hill of Crosses faced its most aggressive threat: the Soviet Union.
In an effort to stamp out Christianity in the Eastern bloc, the Soviet government attempted to level the hill numerous times during the 1960s and ‘70s: they bulldozed it, burned the wooden crosses and removed the metal and stone ones for scrap and construction. People who brought crosses to the hill were fined and incarcerated.
But the crosses on the mound just kept multiplying, left in the dead of night as an act of defiance against religious oppression. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet Union, the crosses still stand.
Article adapted from Lithuania’s miraculous hill of 100,000 crosses (full article available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20171026-lithuanias-miraculous-hill-of-100000-crosses)
Some of the images of the Hill of the Crosses are shown in the porch.