Another installment from Dr. Windy Petrie, Associate Professor and English Department Chair at Colorado Christian University, who was a Fulbright grantee to Lithuania in 2006.
During my time in Lithuania, I had the opportunity to visit
the northern city of Siauliai to speak about American Woman Writers for the 50th
anniversary celebration of the Humanities at the university there. After
my speech, one of the professors who teaches there took us to the Hill of the Crosses. I had no idea what to expect from the name, and, frankly, even
if I had, the site, and the sight, would still have completely blown my mind.
You drive a ways out of town, then down a little side road, and a spreading
clump of hills come into sight. When you get out of the car and walk up to them
you see that these hills, these mounds, are entirely composed of crucifixes,
one piled atop another, and you try to imagine just how many must be there to
create such height, such breadth, and you can’t conceive what the total number
must be. Or at least I couldn’t. And then you start imagining how each cross
placed there was placed by an individual, who made the trip from near or from
far, each for a personal, individual, reason. And you really, really,
can’t conceive of that.
This place is truly amazing. It is thought that the
tradition might have begun when the town was founded in 1250 AD, although existing
records mention them in the early 1800s, possibly due to a local rebellion
against the presumption of the czar in the 1830s. People brought crosses in
honor of those who had been lost in the fighting at that time, and have
continued to bring them during all local and national struggles for liberty
since then. It has also served as a site for Christian pilgrims for many years
now. It's no wonder that these hills, representing to an extent the collective
protest, faith, and hope of the people, grew so large during the Soviet
occupation (and grew larger after each Soviet dismantling via bulldozing,
blockades, and intentional flooding) and continues to grow today.
Lithuania has had a very complex National history, having
been claimed by nearly all of the regional powers at one time, or another, in
its long history. Russia, Germany, Poland, and I believe even Sweden, have all
staked a claim to Lithuania and its people in the last 500 years. Even Napoleon
occupied Vilnius during his losing bid to invade Russia. Lithuania has
remained, through it all, a very independent people. Think of it: they were the
last people to accept Christianity in the whole of Europe. They fought off the
German Teutonic Knights for what I believe ended up being more than a century.
More recently, Lithuanians engaged in clandestine, guerrilla warfare with the
Soviets for decades after WWII. And they were the first Baltic nation to claim
and secure independence in the early 1990's.
As a non-violent means to defy the Soviets during their
occupation of Lithuania, the Hill of Crosses became a historical monument to
the human spirit. For hundreds of years, individuals have been bringing crosses
of all sizes, some taller than a man and others smaller than a key, made of
every imaginable material from precious metals to scraps and rags, to express
faith and loss in times when such expression was forbidden.
After the breakup of
the USSR, the Hill of Crosses gained worldwide fame. Pope John Paul II visited
the sacred site in 1997, and declared the Hill an international site of
devotion. At that time, it became known not only a spiritual symbol of
Lithuanian tenacity, but a contemporary shrine. When I visited, I saw many new
additions to the Hills, bearing labels from all over the world.
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