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‘We would love to enter Eurovision!' The boy who saw some unclaimed land – and founded his own country
Most presidential residences feature a grand entrance, security guards, perhaps a few pillars. They also tend to be inside the country of which the occupant is president. Yet when I arrive at the home of Daniel Jackson, president of the Free Republic of Verdis, it is neither magnificent, nor on the Serbian-Croatian border, where his country is situated, but on a small street round the back of a bingo hall in Dover, Kent.
Jackson, 20, was born in Australia to British parents, and lived in Melbourne until he was 17. He was only 14 when he and a group of friends decided they 'wanted to do something that was unique'. While most others their age were scrolling TikTok, Jackson and his friends – some from south-east Europe who he had met online, some from Waverley Christian College, the Melbourne private school he attended – scoured maps, and discovered an unclaimed strip of forest that falls outside the borders of Croatia and Serbia. They thought it would be fun to see if they could make it into a country, and named it Verdis. The 'micronation' (a largely unrecognised small country, as opposed to officially recognised 'microstates' such as Andorra and Monaco) is just 1.6 hectares larger than Vatican City and has never been inhabited. It has not been part of a nation since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. 'Obviously that was more than 30 years ago,' says Jackson. 'So we believe we're rightful to it under international law.'
Though there is no single, universal way to acquire sovereignty over a territory, Jackson and his fellow Verdis enthusiasts have formed a government, established laws, mapped out the area, planted a flag (pale blue and white stripes; very similar to Argentina's) and attracted 15,000 applications for citizenship, 400 of which have been accepted. Legal experts have told Jackson that 'under international law, the oldest active claimant to the land is the rightful claimant', he says. 'Which is us, because Croatia and Serbia have never claimed this land.'
Verdis is the result of a border dispute in the region. Serbia considers its border to be the centre line of the Danube (this has mostly been the accepted border since the Croatian war of independence ended in 1995). But Croatia wants the border to be 'cadastral' – based on old border maps. The discrepancy has resulted in a few unclaimed pockets of land, such as Verdis (which sits on the Croatian side of the Danube, but outside Croatia's self-defined border).
Jackson and his government have always had a 'positive experience' in Serbia, but Croatian authorities have refused to recognise Verdis, presumably seeing it as an unhelpful presence in this border dispute. In October 2023, when Jackson and a group of citizens attempted to settle permanently in Verdis, they were forcibly removed by the Croatian police. Jackson and his vice-president, Hector Bowles, who lives between Dover and Bulgaria and was introduced to Jackson via a mutual friend, were issued lifetime bans from Croatia. This is a significant setback, given that it is difficult to access Verdis without entering Croatia.
And so Jackson is now, as he puts it, 'in exile', living with a family friend in Dover, where he works from home as a freelance game developer for the online platform Roblox. Still, when I show up at his door, the 20-year-old is in full president mode, dressed in a suit and tie, a tiny metal Verdisian flag pinned to his lapel, and another, much larger fabric flag stretched across a display stand that has been placed in the corner of the otherwise very ordinary living room.
I can't help but feel slightly bemused that Jackson has gone to this effort to prepare for my visit – and even more so when he insists on checking the bathroom has been left in a good condition before allowing me to use it. It's all very endearing, but it feels more like a roleplay of a meeting with a politician.
Jackson admits that, at first, Verdis wasn't something that he took too seriously. 'It was a bit of an experiment,' he says, inspired by Liberland, a larger pocket of previously unclaimed land 20km north of Verdis. That micronation is similarly unclaimed by Croatia and Serbia and was declared an independent country by Czech rightwing politician Vít Jedlička in 2015, who intended the nation to be a tax haven.
'We liked the idea of Liberland, but we didn't agree entirely with its ideology,' Jackson says – so they decided to see if they could create their own version. The name Verdis was chosen for its similarity to the Latin word for green – viridis – and the initial concept for the new country was that it would focus on environmental concerns. For several years, Verdis remained little more than an idea; until 2023, when interest in the micronation began to grow. Jackson, then 18, made several trips to the territory with some of its other supporters. 'We were bringing in tree surgeons. We were doing a lot of cadastral [surveying] work. We camped there for quite a long time if you put all the trips together,' he says. 'I thought: let's make it a reality.'
While I can just about get my head around the idea of a hare-brained teenage scheme that got out of hand, I am finding it difficult to understand why Jackson is still pouring so many resources into a project that is a constant struggle – spending hours learning Serbian and Croatian (Verdis's two other official languages, as well as English), constantly raising awareness, and creating passports that you can't even use to travel. (You can, at least, use them as ID in bars, which Jackson says he has done 'many times'.) There is also the matter of funding – though Verdis's government positions are voluntary, the nation pays ministers' travel costs to Verdis and to any political forums for which they are able to secure invitations, as well as paying to host its website (using a third-party hosting company was deemed too insecure). Jackson and his government have come up with a number of ways to raise money, from selling Verdis merchandise to asking for donations and setting up a citizenship-by-investment scheme. This month the country received a donation of more than $37,000 USD, raised by cryptocurrency enthusiasts through an unaffiliated coin known as $Verdis.
Clearly there are people who can grasp Jackson's motivation better than I can. It's possible that part of the reason for this is my gender – just as it tends to be the male halves of Grand Designs couples who have a stronger desire to build themselves a palace, whatever the cost, it seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis's citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but 'it's a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved'.
While he awaits the day he can attempt to turn these plans for a settlement into reality, Jackson has been spreading the word about Verdis in his local area: he loves a kebab, and his loyal patronage has got the staff at Dover Kebab posting stories about Verdis on Instagram. Jackson moved to Dover after dropping out of school at 17. Australia's 'quite severe' lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic 'killed a lot of my motivation to continue to attend school', he says. He wanted a 'fresh start', and had 'always preferred being in the UK' to Australia, having visited many times throughout his childhood to see family. He initially secured a job with ferry company DFDS, on the Dover to Dunkirk route. Though freelance work suits him much better these days, given his frequent trips to south-east Europe, he still loves the ferries, and plans to treat himself to a short trip to Calais soon. He's had a 'full-on July' travelling to Serbia to raise awareness about Verdis, and briefly to Verdis itself, where he was once again chased off the land by Croatian police.
Jackson says he has been assured that the territory is rightfully his under international law, but 'it's hard for us to take legal action against Croatia when they're not allowing us to access their legal system', he says. He tells me about a recent instance when citizens of Liberland tried to take a Croatian police officer to court after he injured one of them, and 'the judge threw the case out because it didn't happen in Croatian territory'. Any attempts by Verdisians to make similar cases would probably be discarded in the same way, he thinks. 'And in order to take a case to the European court of human rights, 'we have to exhaust all resources in Croatia, which is hard for us to do'. The Croatian authorities were approached but have made no comment on Jackson's case.
Resuming a settlement on the land is Jackson's primary goal – a presence there will release funding that has been agreed with an NGO (he can't tell me which one, as he has been made to sign an NDA), and will vastly improve Verdis's chances of becoming an officially recognised state. But he says Croatia has 'now installed cameras all along Verdis's coastline, so if you even hover your boat for 10 minutes in the territorial waters, a Croatian police boat will be on its way very quickly'. And Jackson and his affiliates have to be careful – after the 2023 deportation, some of Verdis's boats went missing – he suspects they were taken by the Croatian authorities.
He is remarkably hopeful, however. 'Croatia still insists Verdis is not part of Croatia,' he says. 'So we believe it's a matter of when, not if, we're back on the land.' He hopes that with enough pressure from publicity, or perhaps a change of Croatian government, the country will come to recognise Verdis – and even become open to working together. 'Even though we're not happy with what Croatia's done, especially their violation of international law and the way they've treated our citizens, we still want good relations with them in the future,' Jackson says.
I'm not sure if his relentless optimism is simply due to his age or rooted more deeply in his character, but Jackson seems convinced that he will one day live in Verdis, and has plenty of dreams for what the country might eventually look like. Though the original environmental focus has taken a back seat ('We still want to be environmentally conscious … but as Verdis's population builds up we will have to relocate a lot of wildlife'), he envisions the country as a neutral state; 'a middleground between other countries' and 'a good hub for NGOs'. Humanitarianism is a priority for Verdis's government. Most of its cabinet members have previously undertaken aid work – Bowles, for example, set up the Dover-based charity DIY Ukraine in 2022, delivering supplies to Ukrainians, and Verdis previously ran its own Ukrainian aid programme via this charity.
Though Jackson says Verdis 'would want to be part of the eurozone', EU membership is not a goal: 'I am a very pro-EU person, but the EU is not designed for small countries.' A Eurovision song contest entry, on the other hand, very much is. 'We would love to, honestly,' Jackson says, adding that Verdis has 'quite a good few connections with Eurovision contestants anyway' – namely Luke Black, Serbia's 2023 entry, who Jackson has met and says is 'quite a big supporter' of Verdis. When approached by the Guardian, the singer said he had found Jackson's vision for Verdis 'interesting, especially given he's in his early 20s and leading such an initiative'. Though he is 'not affiliated with Verdis in any way', the singer added: 'I wish them well in their efforts.'
Astonishingly, given all the time he has dedicated to Verdis's creation and his hopes for its future, Jackson plans to step down from the presidency the moment the country becomes an established state. 'I just want to be a normal citizen by then,' he says. His own politics are 'centrist', but he would accept the result of an election. 'Even if I don't agree with the next president's views, that's up to the Verdisians to decide, which I would always respect.'
Some of his cabinet members may be interested in running for president, he thinks; but others, like him, have already become 'exhausted' by the workload involved. 'It would be nice to have a break,' he says. 'But we won't give up.'
I can't help but wonder again why he is bothering to go through all of this when it's such an uphill battle, and the reward – a sliver of land that is currently uninhabitable – seems so small. 'You have to be nuts to start something like this, of course,' he concedes. 'But the world is boring without trying something crazy.'
