The Hill of Crosses is one of those places unlike anywhere else. At first glance it's just a mound in the middle of the northern Lithuanian plain, but as you get closer it reveals itself as a forest of crosses: there are thought to be more than a hundred thousand, and nobody counts them exactly because more arrive every day. Huge wooden crosses carved by craftspeople, metal crosses, crucifixes, statues of the Virgin and rosaries hanging by the thousands upon thousands, jingling in the wind. Walking among them is an experience that gives you goosebumps.
But the Hill isn't just a visual spectacle: it's a symbol. The tradition of leaving crosses goes back at least to the 1830s, after the uprisings against the Russian Empire, and during the Soviet occupation it became an act of peaceful, stubborn resistance. The Soviet authorities bulldozed it several times, but people came back at night, in secret, to plant new crosses. That silent tug of war between an atheist state and a people who refused to give up their faith made the Hill one of the most powerful emblems of Lithuanian identity.
In 1993, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass here and declared it a place of hope, peace and sacrifice, which gave it worldwide recognition. Today it's a destination for pilgrimage and respectful tourism, free and always open. This guide explains how to get there from Šiauliai or from Vilnius, what to see at the site and nearby, and how to experience the visit: a place where, if you wish, you can leave your own cross and add it to the hundred thousand that have been growing, cross by cross, for almost two centuries.
The tradition of planting crosses on this mound (originally a medieval hill fort, known as Jurgaičiai or Domantai) goes back at least to the 1830s, after the 1831 uprising against the Russian Empire, when families who couldn't recover their dead began leaving crosses in their memory. Over time it became a place of pilgrimage and of Catholic and national affirmation. During the Soviet occupation, when religion was repressed, the Hill became an act of resistance: the authorities bulldozed it at least three times between 1961 and 1975, and people always rebuilt it, at night. Pope John Paul II's visit in 1993 brought it to the world's attention. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Northern Lithuania, land of the old Battle of the Sun and of the Hill of Crosses: a mound covered in more than a hundred thousand crosses that the Soviets razed again and again, and that the people rebuilt night after night.
Read the history of The north: Šiauliai and the Hill of Crosses →They depart from Kaunas, 128 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became the most famous forest of crosses in the world, the mound we now know as the Hill of Crosses was a fortress. It started out as a piliakalnis: one of the hundreds of earthen hill forts that the Baltic peoples built throughout the Middle Ages to defend themselves. Known as the Jurgaičiai or Domantai hill fort, it held a fortified settlement that, according to archaeologists, was probably destroyed during the Northern Crusades, between the 13th and 14th centuries, when the Christian military orders were trying to subdue Europe's last pagans by force.
There is something deeply symbolic about that origin. The same hill from which the ancient Balts held out against the crusading orders would, centuries later, become the great shrine of Lithuanian Catholicism. The place changed its meaning but kept one constant: it remained a point of resistance against an outside power. First it was pagans against the crusaders, then Catholics against the Russian Empire and, later still, against Soviet atheism.
For centuries, though, the mound was just another hill on the plains of northern Lithuania. Folk legend surrounded it with stories (apparitions, a sunken church, punishments and miracles), as often happens with places like this. The real story of the crosses, the one that would make it famous, did not begin until well into the 19th century, and it is tied to a painful episode in Lithuania's struggle for freedom.
The tradition of leaving crosses on the mound grew out of grief and repression. After the partitions of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, these lands came under the rule of the Russian Empire. In 1831 a major uprising broke out against the tsar, and an even bigger one followed in 1863. Both were crushed harshly, with thousands killed, executions, mass deportations to Siberia and a fierce policy of Russification.
Many Lithuanian families could not recover the bodies of their dead, whether they had fallen in battle, been executed or vanished in exile. To honour them and have somewhere to mourn, people began leaving crosses on the old hill fort. The first crosses are thought to have appeared around the 1830s, after the 1831 uprising, and the custom grew stronger after the 1863 uprising. Bit by bit the hill filled with carved wooden crosses, a silent memorial to a national tragedy.
Under the Russian Empire, the authorities also banned the building and repair of Catholic churches on several occasions and suppressed expressions of Lithuanian and Polish identity. In that context, planting a cross on the hill also became an act of religious and patriotic defiance against a power that was trying to erase that identity. So, as early as the 19th century, the site began to combine its two lasting meanings: Catholic devotion and national resistance.
With the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire, Lithuania declared independence in 1918. In the interwar years, now a free country, Lithuania saw the Hill of Crosses become an established place of popular pilgrimage and a symbol of newly regained faith and identity. People kept bringing crosses, now also to give thanks, ask for favours or fulfil vows, and the number grew steadily.
By the late 1930s the hill is estimated to have held several hundred crosses, some of them large and of real artistic value. Many were carved by Lithuanian cross-makers, whose traditional craft of wooden crosses and chapels is so deeply rooted in the country that UNESCO would recognise it as cultural heritage decades later. The hill became a kind of open-air museum of that tradition.
That period of quiet growth was brutally cut short by the Second World War and, above all, by what came after: the Soviet occupation. The regime installed in Lithuania from 1944-1945 was atheist and hostile to every religious and nationalist expression. For that regime, a hill covered in Catholic crosses, a symbol of Lithuanian patriotism, was an intolerable provocation. The most dramatic, and most heroic, chapter in the site's history was about to begin.
Between 1944 and 1990 Lithuania was a Soviet republic, and the Hill of Crosses became one of the best-known scenes of peaceful resistance to the regime. For the communist authorities, that forest of crosses was unacceptable twice over: it was religious and it was nationalist. So they simply decided to make it disappear.
In 1961 the Soviet authorities levelled the hill with bulldozers. They destroyed the crosses, burned the wooden ones, melted down the metal ones, smashed the stone ones and even scattered waste around the area to desecrate it. But something happened that they had not foreseen: people started coming back, secretly and at night, risking fines, arrests and reprisals, to plant new crosses. Every time the authorities flattened the hill, Lithuanians rebuilt it. It is believed to have been destroyed at least three times (in 1961, 1973 and 1975), and each time it came back.
The authorities even considered extreme plans, such as building a dam to flood the area or cutting off access to it, but they never broke the people's will. The Hill thus became an international symbol of Lithuanian resistance and of faith surviving under communism. It was a place where a whole nation said 'no' to totalitarian power with the simplest and most stubborn gesture of all: planting a cross. That silent struggle, kept up for decades, is what gave the site its deepest meaning and filled it with the emotion you can still feel as you walk through it.
When Lithuania regained its independence in 1990-1991, the Hill of Crosses stopped being a clandestine place of resistance and became, out in the open, one of the great symbols of the new, free Lithuania. Full recognition came on 7 September 1993, when Pope John Paul II visited the site and celebrated Mass before a huge crowd. He was himself a son of neighbouring Poland and a key figure in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
During that ceremony, the Pope declared the Hill a place of hope, peace, love and sacrifice, and described it as a living testimony to the faith of the Lithuanian people. He also left a crucifix as a gift, which is now one of the spots pilgrims look for. The papal visit brought the Hill to the attention of the whole world and established it as one of the great shrines of European Catholicism. Soon afterwards, at the Pope's express wish, a Franciscan monastery was built next to the mound, opening in 2000.
Since then the site has kept growing unstoppably. In 1993 there were about 55,000 crosses. By the early 2000s people were talking about more than 100,000, and today the number is impossible to pin down, because more arrive every day. Pilgrims and travellers from all over the world add their own, alongside the historic crosses dedicated to the deportations, the uprisings and the victims of repression.
Today's Hill of Crosses is a pilgrimage shrine, a place of national memory and one of Lithuania's most visited tourist destinations, all at once. On the last Sunday of July each year it hosts its big annual festival, with Masses and pilgrimages that draw thousands of people. For the rest of the year there is a steady flow of visitors, both Lithuanian and foreign, and anyone can add their own cross, keeping alive a tradition that is nearly two centuries old.
What makes the site extraordinary is that it is still a living, popular phenomenon, not a frozen monument. There is no plan, no design and no limit: the hill grows organically, cross by cross, according to the wishes of the people who visit it. That spontaneous character, together with the power of its history (resistance to the crusaders, to the tsars, to Soviet atheism), is what gives it its unmistakable aura. The wind blowing through the thousands of metal rosaries seems to whisper all those stories at once.
For Lithuania, the Hill sums up much of its identity: a small country, often occupied and carved up between great powers, that held on to its faith, its language and its memory against all odds. That is why, whatever your own beliefs, walking around the Hill of Crosses teaches you something essential about this corner of the Baltic. It shows the stubbornness of a people who, every time their symbols were flattened, came back quietly at night to plant them again.
