Meet the Boy Who Founded His Own Country

By Millie Tougher

As children, we imagine ourselves in hundreds of careers: doctor, firefighter, teacher, as well as the less realistic: King, Queen, President. However, for Daniel Jackson, the latter came true when, at just 14 years old, he founded his own country.

Jackson, now 20, was born to British parents but grew up in Melbourne, Australia. While the rest of their peers were playing video games or endlessly scrolling through social media, Daniel and his friends were trawling through maps where they discovered an unclaimed patch of forest located between Croatia and Serbia. This is how the 14-year-old came to be the President of the Free Republic of Verdis.

Daniel Jackson, now 20 (Source: Jill Mead/The Guardian)

The ‘micronation’ (a mainly unrecognised small country in contrast to ‘microstates’ such as Monaco, which is officially recognised) is tiny at just 1.6 hectares larger than Vatican City and has never been inhabited. It has not been a part of any nation since the breakup of Yugoslavia more than 30 years ago, and the legal experts that Jackson consulted, informed him that “under international law, the oldest active claimant to the land is the rightful claimant”. This means that because neither Croatia nor Serbia have ever claimed this strip of land, it belongs to the Verdisian Government.

However, it is not quite as simple as this, as while Verdis has a good relationship with its Serbian neighbours, it has a much more fraught relationship with its Croatian neighbours, which is causing problems for Jackson’s government.

Map showing the Free Republic of Verdis, with Croatia to the west and Serbia to the east of the Danube. (Source: The Guardian)

In October 2023, Jackson and his friends ‘attempted to settle permanently’ in Verdis but were chased off the land by Croatian authorities while Jackson and his vice-President were also slapped with lifetime bans from Croatia. This creates a significant problem as it is difficult to access Verdis without going through Croatia. Jackson claims the Croatian authorities have gone as far as to place cameras along the Verdisian coastline so if a boat even ‘hovers’ nearby, the Croatian authorities are alerted and respond quickly. This means that Jackson now lives ‘in exile’, as he puts it, in Dover, England. Despite these unfortunate developments, Jackson is surprisingly optimistic about the future of Verdis, saying that he believes that “it’s a matter of when, not if, we’re back on the land.”

When creating Verdis, Jackson was inspired by Liberland, which was a similar venture undertaken by the Czech politician Vít Jedlička in 2015, with a slightly larger piece of land around 20km north of Verdis. However, Jackson’s aims for his country differed, as while Jedlička planned to create a tax haven, Jackson wants to create a green country. This aim is reflected in the name of the country, as Verdis is similar to the Latin viridis, meaning green. According to the official Verdis website, the country is aiming to “minimise its ecological footprint”as well as “promoting sustainable practices”. Jackson has a vision of the country becoming a neutral state in global politics with a humanitarian focus.

As of today, Verdis has almost 400 citizens and counting. When asked why he wanted to undertake this, he said, “You have to be nuts to start something like this, of course,” he concedes. “But the world is boring without trying something crazy.”