Visiting Siauliu

It turns out our apartment is around the corner from a nightclub that apparently stays open until about 4 in the morning, so when we couldn’t sleep, we decided to catch the 5:10 train (instead of a later one, as we had planned) to go to Siauliu (pronounced sort of like show-lay).

This city is near the Hill of Crosses, an interesting place, to which pilgrims and tour buses both flock. It is, indeed, overwhelming, though all that I’ve read (including the link above) leaves me thinking the hill is as much about Lithuanian nationalism as it is about religion. Since Lithuanians are Catholic and Russians are Orthodox, the difference makes a convenient opportunity to express your identify and renounce the others’. Maybe I’m too cynical, but the model I think of is N. Ireland. Real religious differences seem far down the list of motivations for the resistance in that case.

The pope did visit the hill in 1993, though by then the symbolism of his anti-communism would be much less relevant. More the point, John Paul II railed against Godless communism as much as he did Western materialism (more on the latter in a later post).

Apparently, the first two large plantings of crosses were to commemorate Lithuanian insurgents killed in revolts against Tsarist rule—once in the 1830s and once in the 1860s. Then, as you can read in the linked bit, it became a game between Lithuanians and the Soviet government. I don’t think we Americans should overestimate some anti-communist expression. I suspect that resistance to Russia was more motivating than feelings of anti-communism. I can imagine that the religious differences were, in fact, more motivating than something about communism. Russians (and Germans) had been suppressing Lithuanians long before Marx “discovered” the truth about history, and Lenin put it into practice.





Feeling a little like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, waiting for the bus--near the giant strawberry-- back to Siauliu from the Hill of Crosses.

We caught the bus back to Siauliu and stopped off at the town’s cathedral—Saints Peter and Paul, built in the early 1600s, and a bishopric since 1997. Apparently, it was the only building, from the old town, that made it through both world wars. It was King Mindaugus day (the first King, 1253, and regarded as the founder of Lithuania), and we couldn’t tell if the service in progress was for that, or a daily mass, or something else.

After much wandering, we also stumbled onto a curious graveyard.
It was enormous, and laid out in a park/urban forest environment. The oldest graves were only from the early 1900s, but many crosses were obviously original at dates of death from the 1950s and 1960s. So, the Soviets tolerated burial with Christian symbols (and rituals?), but not the Hill of Crosses. Sandy noted that many gravesites were well kept, even if the overall cemetery was a bit unruly, though not unpleasant.

We also wandered past the Orthodox church but did not go in…there was a wedding going on.

I got to use my German to actually accomplish something. All those years of fussing over the genitive case....had nothing to do with it. My triumph was even more gratifying since what I achieved was to tell the clerk where we buying some stunningly delightful teacups and pot that we wanted more tissue wrapper because we are traveling on a flugzeug. (I used a bit more German than that, but not much.)

By the way, I will try to load some pictures to the blog soon.