Hill of Crosses
Kryžių kalnas
Interesting facts
- Pope John Paul II prayed at the hill on 7 September 1993, and the following year he sent a crucifix of his own, which now stands among the crosses.
- A stone at the site records the Pope's thanks to Lithuanians for a hill that bears witness to their faith before Europe and the world.
- The crosses stand on an ancient hill fort, known as Jurgaičiai or Domantai, on the left bank of the small Kulpė river.
- Counts show the hill's growth: about 130 crosses in 1900, more than 400 by 1938, and roughly 55,000 by 1990.
- The first Soviet clearance in 1961 removed about 5,000 crosses; when the hill was cleared again in 1975, some 1,200 had already reappeared.
- For all its fame, the whole site covers less than half a hectare, which is why the crosses crowd together so densely.
- A Franciscan hermitage opened nearby in 2000, its interior designed with references to La Verna, the Tuscan mountain where Saint Francis is said to have received the stigmata.
- Since 1997 a pilgrimage festival has been held at the hill every year on the last Sunday of July.
Why it is worth it
Nobody recorded the day the first cross went up here, but the likeliest account ties it to the failed uprising of 1831 against Russian rule, when families who couldn't find or bury their dead began planting crosses on the site of an old fort instead — a place to mourn people the state had made it impossible to properly grieve. There is no cemetery here. Every cross, from that point on, has stood for someone rather than marked where they lie.
The hill's real ordeal came under Soviet rule, when organized religion was banned outright and the site itself fell out of official favor. People kept coming anyway, and by the late 1950s crosses were multiplying faster than before — partly faith, partly open defiance. In April 1961 Soviet authorities bulldozed the entire hill and burned it: wooden crosses were used as fuel, metal ones melted down for scrap, and stone or concrete ones broken up and poured into road foundations. It happened again at least three more times over the following decades, with locals risking real trouble each time to sneak back after dark and start rebuilding. There were even rumors, at one point, that officials considered flooding the site outright to end the problem for good.
What survived is now recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage — the craft of Lithuanian cross-making itself, not just this one hillside — and the hill carries well over 100,000 crosses today, left by visitors from Lithuania and well beyond it. During the decades it was forbidden ground, adding a cross here wasn't really about religion alone anymore; it was a way of saying, quietly and repeatedly, that a nation the Soviet Union wanted erased was still standing.
Good to know
Visitors are welcome to bring and leave a cross of their own — it's an active tradition, not a museum piece, and the collection keeps growing every year.
Getting there
11 km from Šiauliai. Riga International Airport (RIX) is about 107 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Hill of Crosses is a site of pilgrimage about 12 km (7.5 mi) north of the city of Šiauliai, in northern Lithuania. The precise origin of the practice of leaving crosses on the hill is uncertain, but it is believed that the first crosses were placed on the former Jurgaičiai or Domantai hill fort after the 1831 Uprising. Over the generations, not only crosses and crucifixes, but statues of the Virgin Mary, carvings of Lithuanian patriots and thousands of tiny effigies and rosaries have been brought here by Catholic pilgrims. The exact number of crosses is unknown, but estimates put it at about 55,000 in 1990 and 100,000 in 2006. It is a major site of Catholic pilgrimage in Lithuania.
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