The Hill of Crosses

Roughly 55,000 crosses in 1990. Around 100,000 by 2006. Nobody has ever counted them exactly.

The Hill of Crosses stands about 12 km north of Šiauliai in northern Lithuania, on what was once the Jurgaičiai or Domantai hill fort. The origin of the practice is uncertain, but the first crosses are believed to have been placed after the 1831 Uprising.

The reason is unbearable and simple. After the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire. Poles and Lithuanians rebelled unsuccessfully in 1831 and again in 1863. Families who could not find the bodies of rebels who had died began putting up symbolic crosses on the old hill fort instead. A grave you cannot dig, marked anyway.

What has accumulated since is not only crosses and crucifixes but statues of the Virgin Mary, carvings of Lithuanian patriots, and thousands of tiny effigies and rosaries brought by Catholic pilgrims. Over generations the place came to stand for the peaceful endurance of Lithuanians through everything that was done to them.

Pope John Paul II visited on 7 September 1993 and declared it a place for hope, peace, love and sacrifice, which is the sentence most often quoted about it. A Franciscan hermitage opened nearby in 2000.

It remains an active site, and things move. The Associated Press has reported on crosses being taken from the hill, which is worth knowing before you assume that everything you see is permanent. People add to this place constantly and it changes accordingly.

If you go, bring a cross. That is not a gimmick, it is the entire practice.