Rambynas

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The hill is not high. From the Nemunas it rises some forty meters, a green bluff of glacial sand and clay on the right bank where the great river — the Memel of the German maps, the Neman of the Russian — bends west toward its delta and the sea. A traveler coming up the water sees an ordinary moraine crest, the last of a ridge that runs thirty-five kilometers inland. What the hill held was never in its height. It was in what the people brought to the top of it: the offerings, the fires, the gathering at the year’s turning. For the Balts raised few temples. They set apart the hill, the grove, the spring, and the stone, and Rambynas was one of the high places they set apart — a holy hill above the river, in the country the Germans came to call Lithuania Minor.

The hill above the Nemunas

The land is the lower valley of the Nemunas, the country once held by a Baltic people the chronicles name the Skalvians — Skalviai in Lithuanian, Schalauer in German, a tribe kin to the Old Prussians who lived along both banks of the river by the time the Teutonic Order came north in the thirteenth century. The Skalvians established their settlements around Rambynas, which the regional record names as their holy place. To the south lay the Nadruvians; beyond them, the lands of the Old Prussians, conquered and converted by the Order across the long crusade of roughly 1230 to 1283. Scalovia is described in Peter von Dusburg’s Chronicon terrae Prussiae, the early-fourteenth-century chronicle of the Order, as the land by the lower Neman below the Curonians and the Samogitians — one of the few external windows onto these peoples before the conquest, and an interested one, written by a chaplain of the conquerors.

When the Order had broken the Skalvians, the survivors merged with the Lithuanian and Prussian peoples around them, and the region passed under Prussian and later German rule. Yet it kept a Lithuanian-speaking population for centuries — the Prussian Lithuanians, or Lietuvininkai, of Lithuania Minor — and they kept the hill. Below it, on the floodplain, lies the village of Bitėnai; across the modern administrative map the hill sits in Pagėgiai municipality, Tauragė County, near Lithuania’s border with the Kaliningrad region. About ten kilometers downriver stood Ragnit (Lithuanian Ragainė); to the west, Tilsit (Tilžė), the town that lent its name to a famous treaty.

The name Lithuania Minor is the German-era name for the strip of Baltic country east of the lower Nemunas that lay outside the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania — Prussian, then German, but Lithuanian-speaking. Before the Order, its main peoples were the Skalvians along the river and the Nadruvians inland; after the conquest both were absorbed, and the country filled with a Lithuanian-speaking peasantry, the Lietuvininkai, who farmed it under successive foreign crowns. Rambynas sat near the heart of that country, on the riverbank where the old Skalvian settlements had clustered around the hill they held sacred. The hill outlasted the people who first kept it.

The hill itself has not stood still. Rambynas is sand and clay, and the Nemunas has been cutting it away for as long as the records run. A great landslide on September 12, 1835, carried off a strip four hundred meters long and twenty-seven meters wide; another followed on July 21, 1878, and another in the summer of 1926. Of the broad summit the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts describe, only the northern slope survives. The hill that draws the midsummer crowds today is the remnant of a larger height, eaten down by the very river that made it sacred. Two socketed bronze axes recovered from the site, datable to roughly 1100–850 BCE, are the oldest hard trace of human presence on it; everything else about its early life comes from a thinner and more difficult kind of evidence.

The altar-stone and the midsummer fire

What the tradition holds, and what makes Rambynas a holy hill rather than a scenic one, is the altar-stone. On the summit there once stood a great flat-topped boulder — a nineteenth-century account from 1867 gives it as roughly ten meters across, a little under three meters high on one side and lower on the other, a glacial erratic of the kind the retreating ice left scattered across the Baltic plain. To this stone offerings were brought. In the lore of the region the stone was Perkūnas’s own: the thunder-god, the tradition tells, set it on the hill and buried beneath it a treasure of gold and silver. Another strand makes the hill a giant, Rambynas, a son of the river Nemunas, and the stone his sacrifice, blessed and cursed together by the laumės — the fairy-women of Lithuanian lore — so that while the stone stood whole, good fortune would bless the country, and if it were damaged, ill fortune would follow. The stone was famed above all for the blessings it gave those about to marry; brides and grooms came to it, and offerings of wax and food and coins were left upon it.

That a god placed the stone, that fortune hung upon it, that it blessed a marriage — these are tradition-internal claims, the hill’s own account of itself, carried in the folk-memory of Lithuania Minor and written down only late, in the regional accounts and the folklore collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They belong to the same world as the Baltic veneration of stones in general: across the Lithuanian and Latvian lands the dievakmeniai, the god-stones, were flat-topped boulders that received offerings, and Rambynas was the grandest of them in its region. The marriage-blessing and the curse belong to legend; what stands behind them is the documented fact that the Balts worshiped at stones, as they worshiped at hills and in groves, a religion of the open sacred place rather than the built sanctuary.

The legend has an ending, and it is a famous one. The altar-stone was destroyed — broken up, the story and the record agree, in 1811 by a miller, named in the accounts as Schwartz from the village of Bardehnen, who hired German workers and carried off the pieces to cut into millstones. After that, the tale runs, his fortune failed: the mill was lost in a storm in 1818, and the miller came to a bad end, in some tellings ruined and drunk, in others crushed by the very millstone he had cut from the holy rock. The bare fact — a great boulder broken up for millstones early in the nineteenth century — is documentary; the miller’s ruin is the curse of the laumės coming due, and belongs to the tradition. The stone the visitor sees on the summit now is not the old one. An altar was rebuilt on the hill in 1928, by Martynas Jankus and Juozas Adomaitis, for the tenth anniversary of Lithuanian independence, carved with the Columns of Gediminas; it was itself remade in 2010–2011.

Above the stone and longer-lived than it is the fire. Rambynas is, before all else, a place of the midsummer festival — the gathering at the summer solstice that the Lithuanians call Rasos and, under its Christian overlay, Joninės. The feast falls at the year’s longest day, the night before the day of John the Baptist, June 23 into the 24th; the name Rasos is from rasa, the dew, the midsummer dew held to carry blessing for the year’s harvest and health. On the heights the fires are lit. Wreaths of flowers and herbs are woven and worn; herbs are gathered, for they are held strongest on this night; the fern-flower, which the lore says blooms for a single instant at midnight and must be sought in silence, is the season’s emblem of impossible luck. The fires on the hilltops, the herb-gathering, the honoring of the sun at her northern height — these are the marks of the Baltic solstice, the festival that honored the sun-goddess Saulė at the turning of her year, when she stands longest in the sky before her long decline toward winter. The earliest external notice of a Lithuanian midsummer rite is medieval, from the chronicle record of solstice observances the Order set itself to suppress; the practice as it survives at Rambynas is living custom, carried unbroken in the region and observed there still on the night of June 23.

The hill drew, in time, a second kind of treasure-story, and it is worth setting beside the first because the two belong to different orders of claim. Where the old legend buried Perkūnas’s gold beneath the altar-stone, a later one held that the French Grande Armée had buried treasure on or near the hill during the retreat from Russia in 1812. That tale prompted actual excavations — in the 1930s and again in 1974 — and was finally laid to rest in 2003 with nothing found. It is a useful contrast. The Napoleon treasure is modern folklore, a story attached to a famous place within living memory and testable against a spade; the Perkūnas treasure beneath the altar-stone is the hill’s own sacred account of itself, of another and older order, not the kind of claim a dig can settle. A holy hill gathers stories the way it gathers people, and not all of them weigh the same.

That a holy hill should be also a fire-festival hill is of a piece with the whole shape of the Baltic religion. Its great powers were of the sky and the storm and the earth — Perkūnas the thunderer who splits the oak, akin in the comparative science to the Norse Thor and the Vedic Indra though not the same god; Žemyna the earth-mother who takes the libation poured upon the ground; Saulė the feminine sun who crosses the heaven by day and sails the night sea. A religion of such powers needed no roofed temple. It needed the hill open to the sky, the stone to receive the offering, the fire on the height at the solstice — and Rambynas held all three.

The recovery of a holy hill

How the hill’s sacred standing is known is itself the heart of the matter, because the knowing is late and layered, and the layers must be told apart. Lithuania Minor kept the old gods to the very end of pagan Europe: Lithuania accepted Christianity only in 1387 and Samogitia in 1413, while the Old Prussians and their kin had been conquered and converted across the thirteenth century, and none of them left a native pre-Christian literature of its own. Everything about Rambynas before the modern age reaches us at one of three distances.

The first is the hostile external record — the chronicles of the Teutonic Order and its successors, written by the conquerors and the missionaries, late and interested. Dusburg’s Chronicon terrae Prussiae places the Skalvians by the lower Nemunas and so frames the people whose holy place Rambynas was; but it is a crusade chronicle, and the religion it describes it describes as an enemy’s. To read it is to read past its frame to the thing it half-records. The second distance is the folklore — the legends of the altar-stone, the treasure, the marriage-blessing, the miller and his ruin, gathered into the regional accounts of Lithuania Minor and the broader Lithuanian folk-corpus only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so tradition-internal in their content but late in their recording. How much of the pre-Christian religion such late lore preserves is a genuine scholarly question, and the prudent answer is: some, refracted, and never to be taken neat. The third distance is the ground itself and the names upon it — the bronze axes, the eroding terraces, the place-name Rambynas, and the wider archaeology and Indo-European linguistics that anchor the Baltic religion as one of the most archaic surviving branches of its family.

The stone-cult that Rambynas embodies is itself a case of the second and third distances braced together. That the Balts venerated stones is not in doubt from the folklore alone: across the Lithuanian and Latvian countryside the dievakmeniai, the god-stones — flat-topped boulders, often with cup-marks or basins, set in fields and at the edges of groves — were places of offering well into the era of record, and a fair number survive and are cataloged as archaeological and heritage objects. The general practice is documented; the particular meaning of the Rambynas stone — that Perkūnas placed it, that it blessed a marriage, that breaking it broke a man’s luck — comes from the folklore, late-collected and tradition-internal. The hill thus sits exactly where the Baltic record always sits: a securely attested form of worship (the open-air sacred place, the offering-stone) wrapped in a body of meaning that reaches us only through the dainos and the legends, and must be handled with that knowledge in hand.

It was in the second of those records, the folklore and the regional accounts, that Rambynas was kept and recovered. Through the long centuries of Prussian and German rule, the hill remained a gathering-place of the Lithuanian-speaking people of Lithuania Minor — and in the late nineteenth century that gathering took on a sharper edge. The writer and philosopher Vydūnas — Vilhelm Storosta, the great figure of Prussian-Lithuanian culture — is credited with beginning organized Rasos festivals on the hill in the 1880s, drawing the Lietuvininkai to the sacred height for the solstice. In 1896 the Birutė Society bought a plot of the hill so that larger gatherings could be held; by 1910 a society was collecting money to buy the hill outright, charging a small admission. After the Klaipėda region joined Lithuania in 1923, the festivals grew into great events, drawing visitors from as far as the capital at Kaunas. In 1928, with the altar rebuilt, Martynas Jankus — the “patriarch of Lithuania Minor,” a printer and a smuggler of forbidden Lithuanian books across the border in the years when their printing in the Latin alphabet was banned — began the great guestbook of the hill, the so-called Eternal Book, signed by the gatherers until its last entry in March 1939, days before the German ultimatum that took the region away again. Bitėnai, below the hill, became the resting-place of the patriarchs of the region; Vydūnas and Jankus both lie there.

So the hill carried two freights at once. It was a holy hill of the old religion, the place of the altar-stone and the solstice fire; and it was, under foreign rule, a hill where a people without a state of its own gathered to be itself, where the midsummer feast and the cultural cause ran together. The modern state has protected it as the first of these. A landscape preserve was set around it in 1960, among the earliest in Lithuania; Rambynas Regional Park was created in 1992, some four thousand seven hundred hectares along the Nemunas bend, the Vilkyškiai ridge, and the river’s old oxbow lakes; and in 2001 the hill itself was entered on the cultural register as a mythological object — a sacred natural site under the law, kin in its standing to the hillfort landscapes of Kernavė and the sanctuary hill of Birutė.

What the protection guards is a hill that has lost its old stone and most of its old slope, and kept the thing that mattered. On the night before John’s day the fires are lit again on the height above the Nemunas, the wreaths are woven, the herbs are gathered, and the people climb the eroding bluff to honor the sun at the top of her year — the same gathering at the same turning, on the same hill, that the Skalvians knew before the Order came.

The Nemunas (Neman) river beneath Rambynas hill in Lithuania Minor — the great river on whose right bank the sacred height stands. Rimantas Lazdynas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Rambynas Hill above the Nemunas valley, photographed in the 1930s, the era of the great interwar Rasos gatherings on the hill. Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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