The Hill of Crosses

Our last stopping point in Lithuania was Siauliai, a sleepy little place near the Latvian border which is, somewhat surprisingly, the country's fourth biggest city. The reason we had come was to see the Hill of Crosses, which is about 12km outside the town in the countryside. This is a couple of mounds which, since the middle ages, have been the place where local people put crosses: as signs of devotion, to commemorate loved ones who have died, or to mark a prayer answered. In the Soviet era it became a great symbol of spiritual and national identity. The hill was bulldozed many times by the communist regime but overnight the crosses would all reappear again as local people risked their freedom, and even their lives, to creep to the out of the way spot surrounded by barbed wire to plant their crosses. Many of the crosses commemorate people who were deported to Siberia.

It's an eerie, slightly surreal place to visit. Situated right out in the middle of nowhere, there is no sound but the tinkling of the thousands of rosaries moving in the wind and the slight creaking of some of the bigger crosses. The crosses have overflowed from the mounds and now spread out over the surrounding area. Some of them are very new, planted for people who have died recently, and lots have been put there by pilgrims as a mark of respect and support for the Lithuanian spirit which refused to be destroyed by so many years of hostile occupation. It can't but be an impressive place when you understand its history - it makes you want to plant a cross there, just because you now can. But it is, and perhaps this makes me a very shallow person, a spooky place to be. It's as if the ghosts of a thousand past struggles are still there, haunting the empty field while the rest of the world has moved on. Also, there was one thing which struck a jarring note: a large sign in German, which I think was commemorating all the people killed in the Holocaust, but at the same time calling for all the Jewish people to recognise the true Messiah and convert to Christianity immediately. It was in the shape of a Star of David topped and dominated by a large cross: not the most comfortable of things to see there. Of course my German is a little rusty: let's hope it was just commemorating the dead rather than paving the way for future conflict.

While visiting the Hill, we had what we have decided was a post-communist experience (this sounds better than being conned by a taxi man again). There are no buses out to the Hill on weekends and so we had to take a taxi. The taxi driver charged us the cost of our accommodation that night to take us there and back: a distance of 24km, and wait for us for 20 minutes. There was nothing we could do about it but pay up. We thought that this was quite a good symbol of post communism. You can visit a previously banned site of national and spiritual pride; you can pray there; you can plant a cross there; and you can then be hugely conned by a mafia-esque taxi driver covered in gold jewellry blaring western pop music into your ears all the way there and back!

There isn't much reason to visit Siauliai other than the Hill of Crosses as we found there was absolutely nothing to do there once we'd seen the ornamental sun dial and had a refreshing peek at "Small Statue on High Street" (as the tourist brochure described it). On a Saturday afternoon at 4pm all the shops were closed on the high street, the tourist information office was closed, the one internet cafe in the town was closed and there was just one place to eat and drink open in the whole place. So much for the 4th largest city in Lithuania. We ended up however staying here 24 hours longer than we had intended as we both got a touch of food poisoning - nothing serious but enough to warrant a day in bed. I won't go into details but shall leave it up to your lurid imaginations. And we were so smug that we'd been travelling for three months and hadn't eaten anything dodgy......pride goes before a fall. By Sunday morning however, we were well enough to hit the road again and catch the 9:30 bus to Riga.