The first thing that comes to mind for those who see this chaotic cluster of crosses is that there is a cemetery in front of them. But this is not the case. There are no burials on the Yurgaychu hill, or, as it is now called, the Hill of Crosses. Crosses have long been brought here because of popular belief. And it says: the one who leaves a homemade cross on this mountain will be lucky.
12 kilometers north of the Lithuanian city of Siauliai, there is a low, oblong Yurgaichu hill, completely covered with crosses. There are more than 50 thousand of them here. And according to other estimates - even more than 100 thousand! Among them there are wooden and metal crosses, stone and even woven from threads. There are high ones - up to 9 meters, and there are pectoral crosses only a couple of centimeters long. There are Catholic and Orthodox. And recently even a gilded Jewish six-pointed star has appeared. Some crosses were made by professional sculptors, some - by simple peasants. Some were set here a long time ago, others just yesterday.
The legend of the unfortunate father
Nobody remembers where the belief came from that visiting this place can change a person's fate for the better. Nobody knows exactly when the first cross was installed here. However, the researchers still have several assumptions.
In the surrounding villages, they say that the very first cross on the hill was put up by an unfortunate widower, whose little daughter suddenly fell seriously ill. The father was on duty at the bedside of the dying girl and dozed off. In a dream, he saw a woman in light clothes (in some versions, the Virgin Mary herself). She ordered him to make a cross and carry it to the hill in the village of Myashkuchay. Waking up, the man ran out into the courtyard, grabbed the first log that came under his arm, adjusted the crossbar to it, and hurried up the mountain. His cross turned out to be heavy, so the path of the unfortunate father took 13 hours. But when he returned, his recovered daughter met him on the doorstep. After this incident, people began to put crosses on the mountain.
In another version of the legend, the inconsolable father, who lost his beloved daughter, made a wooden cross with his own hands and carried it to the mountain where the monastery once stood, and then fell into the ground. The father decided that the cross would become a memory of both the disappeared holy place and his daughter. Returning home, he saw that his girl was alive and well. The news of this miracle spread quickly. People from neighboring villages and villages began to bring crosses to the mountain in the hope that everything in their life would work out.
Both versions do not even give a hint of the time when all this could have happened. But in another legend there is an exact date - 1831. At that time, there was a Polish uprising against the Russian Empire, which ended very badly. It was attended by many Lithuanians who fought for independence. Several thousand people died. And the authorities banned the creation of the memorial. They say that then relatives and friends decided to install crosses on the mountain in memory of the fallen and missing. This version is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the first mention of the Hill of Crosses in a written source dates back to 1850. If this strange cluster of crucifixes had existed before, would no one have written about it?
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Monument to the uprising?
After the suppression of the anti-Russian uprising in Lithuania in 1863-1864, the number of crosses on the mountain increased even more. The story of how they appeared here was recorded by the Polish scientist Ludwik Krzywicki in 1895-1898. Then he calculated that 130 crosses were installed on the mountain. He described in detail the Hill of Crosses in his book Samogitian Antiquity.
There is another legend that mentions another date of the appearance of the first crosses on the mountain - the 1870s. The legend tells that the Virgin Mary herself with the baby Jesus in her arms appeared then on this mountain. Dozens of people saw her, and all, as one, later claimed that Madonna had ordered them to install crosses here. What they did with great zeal. So by the beginning of the 20th century, there were already more than 400 crosses, and in the 1950s - about 3 thousand.
These legends and traditions arose at different times, but the history of the Mountain of Crosses actually began long before that. This place is old and mysterious. Researchers suggest that there was once an ancient pagan temple here. True, it is not possible to verify this assumption, since most of the crosses would have to be demolished to carry out excavations. However, there are indirect confirmations of the theory - these are the crosses themselves. Among the oldest on the mountain, there are those that are decorated with ornaments clearly not Christian, but pagan - for example, solar symbols.
Crosses with similar carvings are found throughout the territory of the settlement of the Baltic tribes. Most often they were installed near "sacred" places: near oak groves, where Perkunas was worshiped, in forests dedicated to the goddess Medeina. Such crosses were also placed near large flat stones, which were considered a kind of altars to the goddess of fertility, or at springs. However, the shape of the crosses appeared after a clash with Christian missionaries in the XIII-XIV centuries. Before that there were just pillars. As the Catholic monks wrote, the skull of a horse was often worn on top of such pillars. And an unquenchable fire burned under the pillar, on which the Balts burned their enemies.
Such substitution of pagan pillars for Christian crosses is not uncommon in Lithuania. For example, in Vilnius, on the site of the famous temple of Perkunas, the church of St. Stanislaus was built, on the site of the temple of the goddess of love Milda - the church of Peter and Paul, and on the site of the temple of Ragutis, the patron saint of beekeepers, - Pyatnitskaya church. After baptism, the Lithuanians remembered and honored their pagan customs for a long time. As a result, at the junction of old beliefs and new faith, a kind of "folk religion" arose. And one of the examples of such a mixture of pagan and Catholic rituals is the tradition of placing Christian crosses on the site of former temples.
The tragedy of Kule castle
Over time, a settlement arose around the temple on Mount Yurgaychu, and then a wooden castle. And now more is known about it - in the annals it is referred to as the Kule settlement. This name apparently comes from the nearby Kulpe river. In 1991 and 1993, the remains of wooden buildings, hearths, copper decorations, weapons, ceramics and household items were found here. Most of the finds date from the 14th century. To this day, crumbling ditches have been preserved from this settlement, which were once filled with water from the Kulpe river that bends the hill.
According to the retellings of the lost Younger Livonian rhymed chronicle of Bartholomew Honeke, it is known that on February 14, 1348, the master of the Livonian Order Gosvin von Guericke went on a campaign to Samogitia and the Shauliai land, where he destroyed the castles of Dubis, Businne, and also Kulyai - the very settlement of Kule. Then the crusaders killed many Lithuanians. So just after that, Christian crosses, erected in memory of the dead, could be added to the pagan pillars.
The Livonian knights failed to destroy this strange place, and the Soviet authorities could not do this either. In 1961, they made their first attempt to level the Hill of Crosses to the ground. Bulldozers drove up and demolished about 5 thousand crosses. There were four such attempts in total, but all ended in failure. During the day, the authorities cut the crosses and took them to scrap metal, burned wooden ones, and crushed stone ones. But at night people came and put up new crosses, despite the guards. In 1988, after the beginning of perestroika, the Hill of Crosses was left alone, and since then people can come to it freely.
Marina VIKTOROVA
