19 August, 06
Siauliai, Lithuania
(pronounced Show-lae)
I got here yesterday afternoon, and even though I had a reservation in
a hotel, I had no map or even idea of the city to find my way to it.
The map on their website showed about four streets and I wrote down
those names, and their layout, but mostly I was walking out of the bus
station blind. I headed up the street, towards what looked like a high
traffic area, but didn’t have any luck finding anything except banks
and supermarkets – definitely an area for locals, not tourists. There
was a sign advertising Tourist Information though, indicating a left
turn, so I took the advice and walked several blocks in that direction,
but never saw a tourist office, and finally stopped when it became
clear that it was strictly a residential area. So, I walked up a block,
then back the way I came on the next street up. Still nothing there. I
got back to that main road and pulled out my travel guide, but it was
no help. Siauliai only rates about 2 paragraphs, and most of that is
about the Hill of Crosses.
I walked around for another 20 – 30 minutes (all of this with my full
pack, of course) asking a few people if they recognized any of the
street names, but also investigating all the side streets, the likely
places for hotels. I finally struck gold, finding a hotel – not mine,
but one I’d considered booking, and I went into the lobby. I knew they
were too expensive, but asked about a room anyway while I browsed the
literature in the lobby. I scored with what I was hoping for – a map to
the city, and even better – it had most of the hotels in town marked on
the map and with little blurbs about them as well.
So, it turns out the place I have booked is far north, a good 30 minute
walk. Annoying since I’m only here for one night and I have to get back
to the bus station tomorrow. There is a simarly priced place a bit
south of me though, a ten minute walk from the station, so I head
there. The Turne Hotel is on a dead end street, but its pretty nice,
and they do in fact have a room for me. I head upstairs and drop my
bags, having conquered another small hurdle – walking into a town blind
and finding a place to stay. (Nevermind that I really did have a backup
and could have grabbed a taxi and had them take me there if I’d gotten
really desperate). Oh, and it was good to know the reason no one had
heard of the streets I was asking about is that they were all two
blocks long and half an hour away from where I was asking.
Siauliai is a nice little town, and there is one main tourist/shopping
type street. There are also a couple interesting cathedrals, but
nothing extraordinary. After checking on buses to the Hill of Crosses,
which is about 10 miles out of town, I decided to go in the morning,
and grabbed a late lunch, then took a nap, and walked around town some
more. The main thing I saw in the evening was the saddest little
amusement park ever. They had about six rides, mainly kiddie things
aside from this ferris wheel, and they all looked incredibly old. The
whole thing seemed to be run by a family, and there was a little blonde
girl, the youngest of the family, who was running around the entire
time, obviously wanting to ride the rides, but it was clear her Mother
(young - in her 20's probably), and Grandmother and Grandfather (also
young - in their 50's?) had made it a strict rule that she could only
ride when there were real paying customers there. And there weren't
any. I was in the area for around an hour or so, sitting in the park,
and finally, after that whole time, a couple came up with their young
daughter, and the little blonde girl was about to explode with
excitement. The couple paid and the mom and daughter got onto one of
the rides - a hanging basket that goes in a circle sort of thing, and
the little blonde girl and her grandmother got on as well, while the
Mother operated the ride. I watched them for a while, but for some
reason didn't want to see the ride end and so I headed out.
I ended the evening by having some pizza on a busy strip with
clubs and restaurants. I left around 10:30 and walked towards what I
thought was an alternate way home. I have no idea what kind of space
warp I walked into, but an hour later I was walking back into that same
area from the complete opposite direction. Very puzzling. Along the way
I passed a really great cemetery, but didn’t quite have the guts to go
into it at night when I was already lost. Amazingly, the street that
had been packed and bustling an hour before was incredibly quiet. All
the restaurants were closed, the clubs had shut their doors and were
quiet, though I doubt they were closed. There were hardly any people on
the street besides a few teenagers smoking cigarettes. Weird. I took a
left on the street I thought I was taking an hour before, and three
blocks later was at my hotel. I still have no idea how I got lost, but
thank goodness for the compass on my watchband. At a certain point when
it was clear I had no idea where I was, I just started trusting it,
walking south and west, looking at the street signs and comparing them
to the map (but obviously in the wrong place, as I thought I was south
of the main street, but ended up approaching it from the north). That
got me back to a place I recognized, at least, and home eventually. The
best 90 cents I ever spent.
Kryziu Kalnas - or the Hill of Crosses.
I was up and moving at 6:30 this morning, not so hard as now that I’ve
adapted to the time change, I seem to be waking up around 7am anyway. I
shrugged on some clothes and headed to the bus station, buying a ticket
for 1.60 to the Dolmatai stop, about 6 miles north of Siauliai. The bus
let us off about 15 minutes later – two teenage girls, one older woman,
around 60, and me. None of them spoke any English, so we all sort of
made our way along the 2km hike (1.2 miles) at our own pace. It was a
regular country road and I passed a farmer in the field milking one of
his cows and had a great sense of being outside of a city for the first
time in a long time. Kryziu Kalnas appeared and at first seems a bit
misnamed as its really not much of a hill at all, but more of a bump in
the terrain. I guess when everything is so flat, a rise of 70 or 80
feet can be considered a hill.
I have a lot more to say about the experience there, but time is
running short at the internet café, and besides, for now, I
think I’d rather you just see some of the photos. This page is huge,
and I apologize, but I took about a hundred photos there, and I really
liked a lot of them. Here is a selection.
21 August
So, Kryziu Kalnas – it’s been about two days since I was there and I
still don’t know quite what to say about it. I guess it's always good
to start with the basics since you guys haven’t read the guide books.
Legend has it that people started putting crosses on this hill a few
hundred years ago. The first ones really truly documented are from the
early – mid eighteenth century. In any case, this part of the story
might sttart to sound familiar now (maybe its just me and I haven't
relayed just how many statues and buildings I have seen have been
rebuilt in the last 15 years), but when the Soviets came, they were
having none of it and bulldozed the crosses. All of them. But of course
they came back. So the Soviet’s bulldozed them again. And placed guards
there. More crosses came. Finally Lithuania was able to break away from
the dying CCCP and since then it has turned into what you see in the
pictures. I have to think that its grown a lot in the last few years –
so many of the dates I saw were from post 2000. A lot are from earlier,
of course, but I have to think that there were a lot fewer of them six
or seven years ago.
And that is really the thing that gets you most about this place. For
every six foot tall, hand carved work of art, there are a dozen or a
hundred two foot tall pieces of wood with someone’s name and dates on
it. And for each of those, there are another hundred rosaries and
miniature crosses hanging on them. And then, when you get up to the
center, with the Virgin and Christ statues that seem to be focal
points, there are literally just piles of the small crosses, completely
covering whatever is beneath them. Mounds of them as tall as me, with
pictures and drawings and miniature paintings atop it all. And yes,
there are some trails that wind around the hill and over the top, as
you can see in the photos, but there are also countless little paths
that you have to be very careful walking on, lest you bump a cross and
knock it over. And the hard part for me to wrap my head around is that
each one of them was put there by a different soul. And many of them
are dedicated to someone who died. Not all, the large pieces of
sculpture almost never have names or dates on them as memorials, but
nearly all the small ones do.
As I was walking around, I couldn't help thinking of Sheri. Most of you
won't know her - she used to work at the bookstore with me, but she
makes really great sculpture, often out of small detailed figures,
sometimes Virgins and religious things. I haven't seen as much of her
stuff as I'd like to, or seen her as much as I'd like to, since she
quit the store, but this place reminded me of her aesthetic. I'll have
to make sure she sees these photos.
As I said, I still don't know quite what my reaction to the whole place
is. It was both more than I imagined but also less. I don’t know what I
expected to feel, but I don’t think I felt it as intensely as I
expected. I did feel very, very good walking on the road back to the
main highway though. The combination of seeing such a sight as well as
being outside the city in the quiet, and also – it will sound weird,
but it’s true – the fact that I was able to sort out the bus there, and
walk it, and catch the bus back was a good feeling. I think maybe the
two girls were from here, and the woman, I’m pretty sure goes there
every day. She ended up sitting on the steps reading, and had a packed
lunch with her. I felt too self conscious about intruding to try to ask
her who she was there for… a child or husband most likely, but
everything about her, from the way she walked there to the way she was
sitting in a particular spot and reading aloud quietly makes me think
that she is there very often. Anyway, if I’m right about the girls,
then all the other tourists were on buses or in cars or even cabs.
Sitting by the highway and waiting to catch the bus back, I felt good
about doing it that way. Don’t ask me why. Sadly, one thing that not
quite ruined it, but made me feel differently about it, was a cross I
saw from the USA. It simply said, "To the people of Lithuania from your
friends in Christ in Baltimore, MD. Thank you for this Hill of
Crosses." Somehow, sadly, that one phrase "from your friends in Christ"
tainted the whole thing for me - as though it was some fundamentalist
shrine. I can tell you it definitely is not that, but somehow I can't
shake the feeling. I wish I just hadn't seen that one, but of course,
they had to put it right out front of all the others, by the main path,
not tucked away somewhere. I'm really not anti-religious, at all, but
more and more the American brand of fundamentalist christianity just
makes me mad. I'm not alone, I know, but it bugs me that they've
screwed up my world enough to make me have negative reactions even from
seemingly innnocuous things like this. Bastards.
I've been in Vilnius for two days now, and am obviously behind in
writing about places and posting photos. I did a lot of sightseeing the
past two days, walking around the entire city and seeing most of the
places I planned on seeing. It looks like its going to be rainy today,
so it might be a good day to settle in and do some real writing, both
on this, and on the projects I'm trying to work on. Maybe its crazy
trying to write or do "work" while I'm on this trip, but to be honest,
my brain can only take so much of being a tourist. It feels good to sit
down at a cafe or wherever and pretend I'm working. The world around me
doesn't feel quite so foreign. Besides, this is still only the third
week of 12 - 15, and I'm trying to use that time to make some subtle
changes that will continue when I get back. Writing more is one of
those. First though, I need to head down to the bus and train stations
and sort out my travel to Krakow. It's not going to be the short jaunt
the last couple trips have been, so I might have to take the train.
We'll see what I can find out.
Miss you all,
Stephen