Siauliai and Hill of Crosses

This weekend we went to Siauliai, Lithuania and the Hill of Crosses.  Siauliai is in northern Lithuania, and it’s about three hours from Vilnius by train. We had to get up super early on Sunday morning to take a half hour bus ride to the train station where we would catch our train to Siauliai. The other girls spent the night at the apartment, so we would all be together when we met at the bus stop at 5:30 AM. As it turns out, there wasn’t actually a bus that went to the train station at 5:30. Dima had looked up the times for us and had mixed up the Saturday and Sunday bus times. So we had no bus to take us to our train which was leaving at 6:45. We called Dima and he ordered us two taxis (which we had to pay for of course). He did feel really bad about it and kept apologizing, and the cabs ended up being faster than the bus anyway.

Once we got to Siauliai, we had about an hour to kill before yet another bus came to take us to the Hill of Crosses. So we just hung out at the mall near the bus stop. Lithuanians love their malls. You can always count on there being a huge mall in whatever city you go to. So we went to a crepe restaurant and that took about an hour and half, because there is no speedy service in Europe. The bus to the Hill of Crosses only took about 10-15 minutes, but then you had to walk down an abandoned road in a field for about 20 minutes before you got to the hill.

It is believed that people started placing the first crosses on hill around 1831. That is when Lithuanians first fought for independence from Russia. Since families could not locate the bodies of their dead family members, they put up symbolic crosses on the fort where the battle was fought. The hill was later seen as a symbol of their own national identity and devotion to Catholicism when Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II. People have been placing crosses there ever since. Pope John Paul II even visited in 1993. A stone was placed there inscribed with his quote, “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 history is pretty cool right? But once you get there, the Hill of Crosses is really fun for about 10 minutes. Then you realize that most of it now is just junk. The symbolic significance was ruined once it was only tourists putting up all the cheap crosses they bought at the gift shop. But we walked around there for an hour or so. There were a lot of old people, and there was even one couple getting their engagement pictures taken. Kind of weird, but whatever.

After that, we still had a lot of time to kill before we took the train back to Vilnius. So we walked inside a really cool church they had in the middle of town. Outside the church, there was a cool memorial with a bunch of Russian flags, flowers, and candles.  On May 9, it was Victory  in Europe Day for Russia. So a lot of Russians were celebrating on Saturday. Someone in my group wanted to go to the Cat Museum  there. Not my first choice of destination, but you kind of just have to go along with it. So we seriously walked 30 minutes before we got to it and it wasn’t even open. But we took pictures of the sign. It seemed like a pretty weird place, but Lithuanians are obsessed with cats.

Everyone was really tired on the train ride back to Vilnius. Paige got motion sickness and threw up all over the side of the train tracks once we got off in Vilnius. And on the bus ride back to the apartment, this creepy old man kept trying to talk to me. I told him I only spoke English, but then he still kept leaning into me. Rusty and came over and stood next to me, and he eventually went away. So there’s always an adventure, even when you’re just going home. But it was a fun weekend trip, and it makes you realize how much there is to see in Lithuania.