The wind's sound
Thousands of small metal crosses touching.
Thomas Stegh — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 · B. Villalba — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0
Yes, that is the tradition: crosses of all sizes and prices are sold at the entrance and visitors plant them themselves anywhere on the hill.
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A small hill covered by hundreds of thousands of crosses: Lithuania's most famous and strangest spiritual site, in the north near the city of Šiauliai — people began planting crosses here after the failed 1831 uprising against tsarist Russia, when they could not recover their dead and set a cross in place of a grave. Under the Soviets the hill became a contest of wills: bulldozers levelled it at least three times (1961, 1973, 1975), its crosses were burned and their iron buried, and each time people crept back at night and planted it anew — turning a symbolic graveyard into a peaceful declaration of resistance. Today more than two hundred thousand crosses interlock, from metres-high timber to small rosaries hung on other crosses, including one given by Pope John Paul II after his 1993 visit. The site is always open and free — and the sound of small metal crosses in the wind is what visitors remember more than the sight.
Thousands of small metal crosses touching.
Given by John Paul II after his 1993 visit.
Jurgaičiai, Šiauliai