“If you go to Lithuania, there is a place you should visit: the Hill of Crosses – the Kryžių kalnas,” my wife and I were told prior to a visit to the country.

And so we did on New Year’s Day of 2018. We left Kaunas early in the morning in the direction of Šiauliai, about 150km to the north of Lithuania. The Hill of Crosses is about two hours away from this city.

But we got lost as our car wasn’t equipped with a GPS. Nobody we met could understand us, neither in Italian, French nor English.

We stopped cars, drove to a hamlet to ask inhabitants for directions, met farmers… but it was in vain and it was getting late.

At last, we met a young man in a supermarket who spoke English and told us that the hill was only five kilometres away.

We managed to reach the site, which is in the open countryside, at 3pm. It was already getting dark… and cold.

The hill of … faith

The hill – which is actually a mount – is a sacred place for Lithuanians. But since Pope St John Paul II visited the site during his apostolic journey through Lithuania on September 7, 1993, it gained worldwide recognition.

There one can pray among thousands of crosses of different shapes and sizes – small, large, life-size, wooden, ceramic and metallic – that the Lithuanians (and pilgrims, today) have been planting on the side of lanes, filling a vast large area on the Jurgaičiai mount.

It is believed that the first crosses were placed on Jurgaičiai – or Domantai hill, as it is also called – after the 1831 uprising. The Lithuanians started to place crosses on this mount as reminders of their perished companion rebels of the local uprisings against the repressive Russian authorities in the 19th century. The crosses were seen as the Lithuanian people’s opposition to Soviet suppression.

A €2 coin, featuring the Hill of Crosses, minted by the Lithuanian authorities in 2020. Photo: Wikipedia

The crosses were knocked down and bulldozed several times during the Lithuanian occupation eras by the Soviet Union. The wooden crosses were burned and the metal ones were melted for scrap metal. The place was also used as a waste disposal site and it was dangerous to visit; one even risked imprisonment. However, each time the site was destroyed, the Lithuanians continued to sneak up the hill and plant crosses despite KGB agents patrolling the area.

The hill is today considered as a symbol of suffering, hope and unbroken faith of a nation.

Although the mount gained its name from the thousands of crosses and crucifixes that kept being placed there, statues of the Virgin Mary, carvings of Lithuanian patriots and thousands of tiny effigies and rosaries were also brought there by Catholic pilgrims over the decades.

Visiting the place

We parked on the periphery and joined the few visitors who were already there.

It was amazingly moving and we walked in silence… looking at the different crosses and other relics… and reflecting on the strong faith of man, especially when oppressed by powerful abusing authoritarian regimes. But, above all, it was a scene that would not be forgotten easily.

My wife, Irma placed a cross with the names of her late parents, Mary and Josef, among these crosses.

Pope John Paul II

Pope Paul John II seems to have been impressed by the site.

“The Cross is exaltation, a sign of God’s love and a sign of eternal life in God,” he had said on the day he visited in September 1993.

He was especially moved by the fact that a cross was placed there to pray for his recovery after the attempt on his life on May 13, 1981.

A note on a granite monument on site, recalling an observation the pope had made, reads: “Thank you, Lithuanians for this Hill of Crosses, which testifies to the nations of Europe and to the whole world the faith of the people of this land.”

The holy father would recall the ‘collection’ of crosses on later occasions.

Pope John Paul II praying among the crosses and crucifixes in September 1993. Photo: Wikipedia

In 1994, while presiding over the Way of the Cross at the Roman Coliseum, he drew the attention of pilgrims to the Hill of Crosses:

“I was amazed by that Lithuanian coliseum, which is not from the times of the Roman Empire but from our very own times, a coliseum of this past century... Today, I recall many other ‘coliseums’, ‘hills of crosses’, in both the European part of Russia and in Siberia,” he had said.

And, in 2003, when the Lithuanians were celebrating the 10th anniversary of his apostolic visit, in a letter to Lithuanian cardinal A. J. Bačkis, Pope John Paul II wrote: “Could I remember the Hill of Crosses without feeling moved? This evocative place reminds Lithuania’s Christians of the burning witness to faith of the entire nation, a nation that relied on the main symbol of God’s love for humanity – the love that Jesus Christ showed to the end by his suffering, death  and resurrection.”

Site’s significance

Due to the symbolism of cross-crafting during the Soviet occupation, UNESCO named Lithuanian cross-crafting in the list of good safeguarding practices and intangible cultural heritage. [Inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (originally proclaimed in 2001).]

The hill stands as a testament to the Lithuanian people’s determination to preserve their religious and national identity during those hard times.

Due to its religious significance, however, the Hill of Crosses has become a site of pilgrimage for Catholics from all over the world.