Siauliai, August 22, 2005 - Monday
Trip Start
Aug 12, 2005
1
15
23
Trip End
Aug 27, 2005
Siauliai,
Lithuania
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Siauliai bus terminal is located right below one of the main city thoroughfares, Tilžės gatvė, and just a bit farther away, down the same street, there was also the "Norna" guesthouse. I didn't want to make a science out of search for accommodation. The price there was all right, the hotel was near the bus terminal and if there would be rooms available, I decided to stay right there.
Right off the main street, I entered a courtyard, at first very much like those of Mexican moneymen in western films, which means surrounded by low, whitewashed buildings
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. After a shorter search, when at first I had seen no one around, I located one lady and tried to explain that I was looking for a place to stay overnight, so if there were still any rooms free, one would do just fine. As usual, she didn't know the first thing about English, but she managed to get what I was after. So she took me to one of those white buildings, the smallest one and right by the main street, opened a door and showed me the room. True, it was pretty noisy since right on the opposite side of the window there was the pavement of one of the town's busiest streets, but it was very clean and I would even say luxurious. Particularly for its price. The bathroom was immaculately clean and so I said to myself, traffic or no traffic outside, I would take it.I nodded and thereby the first negotiation phase was concluded with flying colours. I left my stuff right there, and then we began working out the details. But this part wasn't going to be that easy. They lady spoke English roughly as well as I spoke Lithuanian, the only difference being that she probably cottoned on to words like "room" and "money". As for my Lithuanian, I couldn't get my head around as little as that. But then, from somewhere she dug out a beefy hunk who, compared to her, was like an advanced English course student, which in practical sense meant we eventually managed to agree not only when the breakfast would be served the next day, but also that I would pay for the room as soon as I went to the bank and withdrew some money from an ATM machine
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. Then I would be back, take over my key and everyone would be happy ever after.They directed me to the nearest bank which basically meant going on down the Tilžės gatvė towards the downtown, so that's where I went.
And indeed, the bank was there. But for some reason the ATM wouldn't accept foreign credit cards. I circled around the block a bit, but I found nothing else. I could've gone on searching. After all, Siauliai was bound to have more banks and ATMs. But I had only arrived and was not yet familiar with even the most basic downtown layout. And I didn't want them to wait for too long for me in the hotel. So for a change I decided to simply exchange few Euros in the bank. At the end of the day, it hardly mattered whether I would withdraw the money from an ATM or exchange the old fashioned way.
So I entered that bank, one of those airy edifices with an interior decorated a lot along the lines of how all modern banks in Europe nowadays look like. Which means with a lot of space and even more glass. There were quite a few people inside and it almost answered my question as to where the population of the Baltics was hiding when they were not out in the streets. I also saw a machine for automatic printing of paper clips with queuing numbers. However, as in some banks, or even majority of banks, you don't need to wait for the exchange office window in a queue with other clients, I decided to ask if here by any chance the same rule might govern
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. All the more so since I couldn't see a single word in English anywhere around, not even "exchange", so by extension I had no idea which window to go to in the first place. I cast a look around and saw two or three bank clerks who were doing things apparently unrelated to any clients. I headed towards one of them to ask for instructions.I came up to one window and said:
"Hello, do you speak English?"
The relatively young woman sitting there at first hardly popped an eyelid. I assumed she was doing something very important, so she would answer me once she was done with her sentence. Or calculation. Or whatever it was. So I waited a bit. I didn't want her to lose any threads for me. And then, after she could have not only picked all the threads around, but probably knitted a pair of socks with them, she met me with the coldest look I had ever seen in my life, which would petrify every rabbit on the planet, and said only two letters with the crustiest tone I had ever hard:
"No."
And without any further addition got her eyes back down to whatever she had been doing there. Caught completely off-guard, I felt as if she had first hit me with a hot iron, then poured a bucket of icy water over me and finally tied my stomach into a tightest of all the knots
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. I didn't even remember to wonder why. I was simply shocked. With the authority of ultimate rudeness she got rid of me so effectively that I, dumbfounded, just turned around and left. I was sure every rabbit would any day rather face a cobra than this bank clerk who easily put to shame even the Gorgon's head.I sat down to pull myself back together. That was literally the first thing I instinctively felt I had to do. Only then, when after a while I was myself again, I stood up, fighting back the impulse to leave the bank altogether. The more I pulled myself together, the more I felt hurt. And only then did I start wondering why. But the hotel had to be paid.
I clenched my teeth, summoned my shaken courage and approached another clerk. Completely unable to smile, I just managed to be polite and said:
"Excuse me, do you speak English?"
And this lady smiled widely and answered:
"A little."
Smile is a flame that melts every ice. The same thing happened here. The girl explained that there was no separate window for money exchange there and I simply had to step in the queue. No problem. Just so that I know. I thanked her, she smiled again at the end, as if she knew I desperately needed something like that after the episode before, then I picked my number and got in the queue
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.The queue dragged on, but I got my litas at last, got back to the hotel, paid, picked up the key and finally went out to just do the sightseeing of the town. Or its surroundings, rather.
For what really made Siauliai famous is The Hill of Crosses or Kryžių kalnas in Lithuanian. A hill which in a way had even become a pilgrimage site was the first, and maybe the only thing that put Siauliai on the international tourist map. Now that I was there, I wouldn't miss out on it. Whatever I would see in the town, fine, but I had to start it off with Kryžių kalnas. Not far from the bank where I had exchanged money I came across a taxi cab or two. I asked one of the drivers how much he would charge me if he took me to Kryžių kalnas.
"Twenty litas," he said.
I nodded and we were on our way. Only ten minutes or so later we stopped in the middle of nowhere, which in case of Lithuania means in the middle of endless green and low flatland. OK, not really nowhere. There was what to me looked like an improvised, unpaved car park and a tidy number of cars which not all carried Lithuanian licence plates. And that was all. The driver waited for me to pay and after I had got out, almost before I could shut the door behind me, he was already whizzing back to town.
Kryžių kalnas. At first sight it was just a number of souvenir sellers who here by the road were at hand to everyone who possibly wanted their own cross to become a part of the Hill of the Crosses. The help came with some profit, of course. Then on the second look there was a small dirt path along which an ever thicker fence of crosses started growing, and it all eventually culminated with this hillock which like a porcupine was bristling with thousands of crosses
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.At first those were just crosses. After that crucifixes started popping up, too. And today precisely those crucifixes were visually the most impressive sight on the Hill of the Crosses, some of them as much as several metres tall. Maybe the most famous one today was the one erected on behalf of the Pope John Paul II who on September 7, 1993 visited Kryžių kalnas and held a Holy Mass attended by more than one hundred thousand people.
As many as there had been people there on that occasion, probably there were now crosses there. Since 2002 the place has held the UNESCO's World Heritage Site status, so its future is probably finally guaranteed for as long there will be the world as we know it. But it wasn't always like that. It was much more often that all sorts of forces had a hostile attitude towards this locality, for those crosses with time tended to grow into symbols against foreign occupation. And there was a healthy measure of it in these parts. The occupation, I mean. During Soviet times you would end up in jail if caught planting a cross there. But it didn't stop people from making pilgrimage in commemoration of all the victims of the regime. So the Soviets, with their trademark subtlety of a sledgehammer and delicacy of an elephant in a greenhouse, bulldozed the hill on at least three occasions. In 1961 wooden crosses were smashed and put on fire, metal ones used as scrap metal, and stone and concrete ones crushed and buried
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. In the early seventies of the last century about half a thousand crosses were routinely demolished each year without even going through the motions of doing this secretly. Later the tactics became more subtle. Crosses were demolished under the pretext of having no artistic value or epidemics were conjured up to give authorities a solid reason to prohibit people from going there. There were attempts or at least plans to flood the territory. Despite all these endeavours to stop people from visiting the Hill, crosses would reappear after each night. So when they survived that, they were mushrooming now.The crosses on the Hill were first mentioned in written chronicles in 1850, but it is widely believed that the first ones were planted by relatives of the victims of the 1831 anti-Tsarist rebellion since the tsarist government wouldn't allow the families to honour their dead properly. There are even legends claiming that the spot to honour their fallen family members and friends wasn't taken by chance, but rather in a logical follow-up to the fact that first crosses had appeared on that particular spot as early as the 14th century. To me personally, and to the vast majority of common visitors I believe it didn't change much. The crosses were simply there and Kryžių kalnas was really a place to see.
When some half an hour or a bit later I decided to return to Siauliai, I first hoped to catch a taxi back
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. But there was not a whiff of a taxi around. Seeing what time it was, I decided to go on foot, which meant some two kilometres, back to the main road and there catch a local, suburban bus, because on my way here I had noticed a bus stop there. Two kilometres had never been a problem.Fifteen minutes of a brisk pace later, in the late, but still very sunny afternoon, I was standing at the bust stop and reading the timetable which cheerfully said that the last bus for today had passed that way an hour earlier. The only thing left to go for me was hitch-hiking. It'd been some time since I had last travelled like that, so my thumb might have gotten rusty a bit. How else to explain the fact that no car displayed a slightest trace of intention to stop and give me a lift downtown? Maybe in such a way that potential candidates behind the wheel had seen friendlier-looking fellows before? Either way, I didn't think about it at first. Later, as time and cars passed by, and my position hardly changed, even such thoughts started popping up in my mind. But whatever I might have thought, or whatever the reason might have been, I didn't feel like going back to Siauliai on foot. Yet. I said to myself that for as long as the situation was not critical, and it usually became that only once you started seeing it as such, I wouldn't be thinking about anything else than how in no time someone would stop. I decided to take a deep breath or two, blow every and last seed of negative thought or fear out of me, and expect the best. Knowing that the best would come any time now.
Well, it didn't come exactly "now", but eventually it did. In the form of an old prehistoric, rickety "Škoda" with a friendly grandpa behind the wheel. He stopped, lowered the window, I pointed in the direction of town and asked:
"Siauliai?"
He nodded and I got in. Of course, he was another of those who couldn't utter a single word in English. In his time, when my generation hadn't come up on stage yet, Russian was the lingua franca. It didn't help much to the two of us, but we understood each other enough so that I could inform him where I was from and to explain that wherever he would drop me off in town would be just fine with me. That's how it was and eventually I was back in Siauliai.
The old man didn't let me out exactly in the town centre, but rather on a spot which was a combination of a park and a residential area, near the Telkša lake. On the opposite Telkša side there was allegedly so-called ecological path, stretching in the length of more than five kilometres along the lakeshore, complete with information stands, benches, observation posts for bird-watchers and so on. But same as Jelgava earlier today, Siauliai is another town which deserves much more than just a few hours I had in hand. So unfortunately in my case, a lot of it was going to remain unseen.
Hence I started climbing from the lake up to the town centre and the park first brought me to the first Siauliai landmark, the St. Apostles Peter and Paul's Cathedral. The church itself, the way it stood now, had been constructed in the place of a wooden church first built there in 1445. However, wars, fires and storms constantly assailed the church and after one devastation too many in the early 17th century it resurrected shedding wood altogether, in the renaissance style, plastered in white, with a high tower and red tiled roof. Ever since, regardless of restorations, it hasn't changed much. The southern wall of the cathedral sports one of the oldest sundials in Lithuania which at the same time is cracked up to be rather accurate. Well, I didn't check, so I can't attest either way.
There's a legend about a huge ox which once upon a time wandered into Siauliai, lay down to have some rest, and passed away while asleep. As the time passed, the wind blew in dust and sand, covered the dead ox, and created a small hill. And on that hill St. Apostles Peter and Paul's is standing today.
From the cathedral I gradually moved on in the direction of the downtown itself and arrived in the pedestrian zone where the main street, not entirely surprisingly, is called Vilniaus gatvė. The first thing to strike me, somewhere around the Tilžės and Vilniaus gatvė intersection, on the cobbled pavement in front of the "Teatro" café, was the sculpture called "A Reading Man". The geezer was standing there, leaning slightly forward, all dressed-up in the waistcoat and frock, with the cylinder hat on his head. Some say he is going about the reading business, some say he's beckoning people and luring them into the theatre. Either way, it was a refreshingly dippy piece of plastic art.
Next on, down the Vilniaus gatvė I stumbled upon another statue, well, a bust, rather, of a certain Povilas Visinskis who turned out to be a locally known journalist. It was located on a widening where there were a few cafés, as well, with in Lithuanian terms surprisingly many people, but already ordinarily many gorgeous-looking ladies. The first user's guide on good manners may not have been written and printed in Lithuania and Latvia - or maybe not even translated there yet - but the two countries easily boasted unusually many of the prettiest Caucasian women I'd ever seen anywhere. In that respect, Siauliai was no exception. So in many ways, it offset some things I'd brand less than representative in these parts.
Next in line, also on Vilniaus gatvė, was the Rūde Fountain. In the shape of a just broken egg peeking out of an egg-cup, it allegedly symbolizes its namesake stream that used to flow right there. In preparation for the celebration of the town's 750th anniversary, they tamed the stream and sent it underground. And on top of it placed this fountain. It all happened in 1986. How much the town gained or lost by paving a live stream over, it was impossible for me to say. I assumed they knew what they were doing. But one thing was certain. Siauliai, too, was old.
After an almost two-century long stint as a defence post against the foreign raids, once those were finally over, it started to develop as an agricultural settlement. Then that ox must've come along when they built the wooden church. For a while it prospered growing into the administrative centre. But then some more foreign incursions and attempts at conquests, together with a plague, set it back again. And so it went, on and off, up and down, but in sum total the things were gradually going up for the city. It grew and became an important educational and cultural centre. Also, its infrastructure developed rapidly with an increasing length of roads and railroads constructed. But then the World War I came and another setback with a lot of property destruction along the way. It was followed by some more prosperity, only to see another World War with an even more severe devastation.
Today the town is finally at peace and with no new turmoil in sight. The demographics are nowadays heavily in favour of Lithuanians who make up a vast majority of local population, and all others combined hardly reach 7%. Which is quite a change compared to just over a century ago when Jews accounted for more than half of the population. Well, as they say, the change is the only thing that never changes.
When it appeared to me that on Vilniaus gatvė in the direction I was going there was nothing more of interest to me, I turned around and went back. Again on the Tilžės and Vilniaus gatvė intersection, I stopped by two more small town symbols, a talking cockerel clock and the Pelicans Statue. The cockerel clock allegedly not only crows, but also greets people in numerous languages ranging from English to such ones as Romany and Esperanto, for example. While I was there, it was conspicuously mute.
Occupying a less lofty spot than the cockerel, the Pelicans were watching over a low, rectangular fountain, finding themselves a new pastime after an evil sorceress had turned them into stone once upon a time. Or so they say.
On from there, I soon came across a disturbing sight in the form of a long line of felled street trees. I couldn't understand why and who had come to an idea to cut those trees whose dismembered trunks and tops were still lying on the slab-covered pedestrian zone ground. I knew that every now and then there would be an architect or a town official whose vision the trees wouldn't fit into. Whatever vision it was. But I could never understand ideas behind such thinking. Urban aesthetics, the way I saw it, would only improve with every new growing tree.
Either way, I concluded there that I had had it when it came to walking for today. After two towns in two countries, a healthy number of kilometres and even more sunshine, the felled trees seemed a good reason to stop myself in my tracks. Ruta was still sending me no messages, which in essence meant we wouldn't meet. For even if she would send me a message tomorrow, it was too late for me to meet her. I delayed my last part of this trip, i.e. Estonia, as long as I could. I couldn't do it any more. Well, at least it wasn't up to me.
