Uzupis Utopia

Before traveling to Užupis, a self-declared republic within the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, I read the 2009 novel The Republic of Užupis, by Korean author Haïlji. The protagonist, Hal, hopes to return to Užupis to lay to rest his father’s ashes. Upon arriving, he encounters confusion about the republic’s location, first with customs agents at the airport and then with his taxi driver, who circles Vilnius for more than an hour searching for the neighborhood. This is pure magical realism, but the allegory makes its point: Užupis, a micronation founded in 1998, is elusive to outsiders but meaningful to those who want to believe.

Arriving via Stockholm, I begin my journey differently than Hal. I bypass customs at Vilnius Airport and head straight into a cab. The driver easily pulls up my Užupian Airbnb on GPS. We wind through the narrow turns of Vilnius’s Old Town, and Billie Eilish’s familiar vocal fry on “Bad Guy” growls from the speakers as we cross the Bridge of Užupis. Užupis means “beyond the river,” and the republic’s parliament is housed in a watering hole that overlooks the moat-like border. In an alcove in the stone embankment sits a bronze mermaid statue that’s famous among locals; it was created by Romas Vilciauskas, an unremarkable sculptor by Google standards. Legend has it that if you look into the mermaid’s eyes too long, you’ll never leave.

Visiting a new city just as the leaves start to turn is one of travel’s many charms. Visiting a micronation on the precipice of autumn belongs in a separate category. Here, the air shivers with the past and a promise for the future of humanity. The Užupian constitution, 41 articles in length, is posted on mirrored plaques for public consumption and is considered required reading for tourists. Ruta Ostrovskaja, the republic’s Ambassador in Vigor and Decision Making, calls the document “one of the best human rights declarations in the world.” Articles range from “Everyone has the right to love” to “Everyone has the right to cry.” Some border on the absurd. (“A cat is not obliged to love its owner but must help in time of nee[d].”) Notably, in December 2018, the version of the constitution at the Embassy of the Republic of Užupis to Munich—the document has been translated into dozens of languages—became the first ever to recognize artificial intelligence: “Any artificial intelligence has the right to believe in a good will of humanity.” (Said embassy consists of a small collective of artists and techies based in the Bavarian capital.) According to Ostrovskaja, the constitution wasn’t written to be zany. It was written in the interest of survival.

“My intention was to pack all the world into one little place.”

Užupis was founded on April Fools’ Day 1998 and has since captured the attention of artists, poets and the technologically forward alike. It raises questions about the dwindling possibilities for borderless states in a post-digital world and the potential for creative autonomy and self-governance amid rampant globalism. Comprising 148 acres and cordoned off from the rest of the capital by the Vilnia River, it has roughly 7,000 inhabitants. MicroFreedom, a website that indexes the world’s micro-nations, ranks Užupis as “distinguished” for its longevity and success. It has been likened to Christiania, Copenhagen’s hippie commune, minus the open-air cannabis market. Munich’s ambassador to Užupis, Max Haarich, has even suggested that it’s the most stable republic in Europe. Yet the ephemeral nature of a micronation invites projection and change: Depending on whom you ask, Užupis is either a revolutionary political project or a fairy tale; it’s a figment of the Baltic imagination or another rapidly gentrifying former Bohemia. In truth, Užupis is all these things.

The Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, a division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research within the U.S. State Department, owns a collection of letters that have been referred to internally as the Ephemeral States file. The collection paints the micronation movement as a study in contrasts. One letter is from Leicester Hemingway, brother of Ernest, and comes with an endorsement from an employee of the Inspector General’s Office that reads, in part, “She knows Mr. Hemingway quite well and says he is not a kook and that he is quite serious about this cause.” The endorsement pertains to Hemingway’s 1973 request that the United States recognize an artificially created island near the Bahamas. The request was denied. Another letter, from an indigenous leader, sought permission to establish the Maori Kingdom of Tetiti Islands in the South Pacific. Nothing came of it.

Most of the file’s contents are comical and a testament to the male desire to conquer even a thimble’s worth of territory. But some letters, such as the one from the Maori Kingdom, are harder to dismiss. In a region littered with colonial holdovers, who’s to say who owns what?

The internet has no doubt accelerated interest in micro-nations. It has also divorced the movement from physical territories, though the existence of areas such as Užupis, which the Dalai Lama visited in June 2001, continues to lend credence to land projects. Travis McHenry, who manages MicroFreedom, tells me that the late-1990s rise of GeoCities, which stored user-created web pages, was instrumental in bringing awareness to individual micronations and the movement as a whole. In 2001, he used GeoCities to build a web presence for his own micro-nation, Westarctica, which corresponds to 620,000 square miles of unclaimed territory in Antarctica. McHenry, who was in the Navy at the time, staked his claim online for fun. He says the project backfired when two men from the Pentagon came to interrogate him and threatened to revoke his security clearance. Tensions were high in 2001, so McHenry recused himself from his “throne” until his military service ended. He has since transitioned Westarctica into an environmental nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of the region.

The Seasteading Institute, founded by libertarians in 2008, sits on a similar axis of good intentions and make-believe. Its mission is to build autonomous floating cities to counter global ills such as rising sea levels, overpopulation and poor governance, but tax evasion would no doubt be a primary draw for the wealthy wishing to establish residence on a seafaring city. The institute’s ambassador program represents 29 countries and 24 U.S. states, as well as Washington, D.C. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has already invested in the project.

Elsewhere are subreddits, Facebook groups and at least one Discord chat devoted to the micronation movement and populated by younger generations. Of the increasing interest among young people in establishing their own sovereignty, McHenry points out that it solves two perennial gripes of adolescence: a “lack of control and having no friends.” It’s also a creative exercise, offering opportunities to design currency, flags and stamps. Some of these useless stamps, termed Cinderellas, become collectors’ items, according to MicroFreedom founder Steven Scharff. “Not because of the fantasy element,” he says. “The running joke is that the issuing party is gone at midnight.”

On my first night in Užupis, I manage to avert my eyes from the mermaid and instead focus on the Bridge of Užupis as I wait in parliament for the foreign minister, Tomas Cepaitis. I watch a man wade into the river to fasten a wooden swing to the wrought iron railing, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Known as Destiny’s Swing, the attraction is a permanent fixture; the laborer is replacing its broken predecessor. Above the swing are doily-like dream catchers made by local grandmothers. “They’re going to dissolve in the winter, like our memories of our women,” Ostrovskaja later tells me.

Cepaitis and Romas Lileikis, Užupis’s president, founded the republic and wrote its constitution in an attempt to reshape the area’s history. Before World War II, Užupis was a Jewish neighborhood, but about 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust. The emptied area deteriorated and criminals terrorized anyone unfortunate enough to walk the neighborhood after sunset. The area’s main thoroughfare soon earned the nickname “the Street of Death.”

Cepaitis was familiar with the works of midcentury Polish writer and futurist Stanislaw Lem, who predicted such technologies as virtual reality and search engines. Now that those innovations are no longer science fiction, Cepaitis is less interested in them. Amid the technological developments of the past two decades, Cepaitis tells me, “the soul remained the same—or became more savage.” He adds, “You cannot live in a fairy tale all the time; you cannot live in reality all the time. My intention was to pack all the world into one little place.”

Declaring independence has been a test, in some form, of Lithuania’s post-Soviet government. Would the area tolerate a new doctrine? The material conditions of Užupis have certainly improved since 1998—almost too much. For more than two decades the area has prospered under the utopian constitution. In 2004, geographers Harald Standl and Dovile Krupickaite published a study of gentrification in Vilnius with a special focus on Užupis. They found that between 1998 and 2003, real estate prices in the area rose by more than 70 percent. They also found that 65 percent of the heads of “new households” in Užupis had a university degree, versus 12 percent of “old households.”

Užupis is now one of the most expensive places to live in Vilnius. Electric scooters zip by a sculpture of an angel in the republic’s central square. Herr Katt, a hip barbershop, and Kitsch, a gallery-café, cater to a new generation. Kitsch accepts Bitcoin. It also serves an Užburger on a blue bun in homage to the republic’s flag, which features a hand encircled in blue. Cepaitis tells me these changes are not unwelcome as long as the atmosphere is preserved, but he also claims that historic wooden buildings have conveniently gone up in flames to make way for development. In this way, Užupis is no different from every gentrifying community in the 21st century.

In 2013, Gleb Divov, a Moscow native, was planning a move to Barcelona. He was set to open a company there and had even learned Spanish. On a whim, he booked a three-day trip to Vilnius and ventured into Užupis on the last. “When I walked across the bridge, it just clicked: Okay, I’m home,” he says. Divov subsequently moved to the area, where he founded a start-up, Musical Blockchain, that aims to bring residents together with compositions created by artificial intelligence.

Divov is a synesthete: He can hear a melody just by looking at an object. His AI composer uses more than 40 data points—from color to shape to environmental conditions—along with a coded knowledge of music to turn areas of Vilnius into a symphony. “We define musical composition as a chain of linked blocks,” he explains. Now Užupis’s Minister of Sound, Events and Technologies, Divov dreams of implementing this tool as a means of canceling out noise pollution and drawing attention and new visitors to underdeveloped parts of the city.

The city wasn’t always tourist-friendly, according to William Adan Pahl, a Detroit native who has lived in Lithuania since the year of Užupis’s founding. But Užupis, by welcoming newcomers with open arms, benefited from a wave of tourism that flooded Eastern Europe following the Pan-European expansion of Ryanair airlines and Lithuania’s new popularity as a destination for bachelor parties. (“The cities of Eastern Europe may come to curse the day they ever got that Ryanair route,” reported The Independent in 2016. “Yes, invading hordes of drunken Brits is good for the local economy, but at what greater cost?”)

“It was like something was coming from off in the distance and we were going to be ready for that change when it came,” Pahl says. He stops short of calling the government a drinking club and considers the constitution a symbol rather than a living political document. “From my point of view, we’re celebrating the instrument of the constitution. It’s the focus of a celebration. It’s not a tool. It reflects the spirit of the place,” Pahl says.

Haarich, the Munich ambassador, wants to use Užupis as a model for bringing together techie and art communities. He worked in artificial intelligence at a start-up center partnered with BMW, among other companies, that has plans to expand into one of Munich’s artist communities. “Artists can make technology more ethical just by bringing it closer to society and making it more accessible,” he says. “There’s this big threat of gentrification—but there’s this big chance to create something very innovative that I want to connect to Užupis because it has 22 years of experience with gentrification.”

Haarich is part of a Facebook group dedicated to micro-nations. It’s filled with people hoping to found their own Užupis. Few of these communities will survive—but if they do, technology will likely play a role. McHenry says, “They really are an inspiration to every other micronation out there and to common people who have no idea what a micronation is.”

As if to underscore the fascination with Užupis’s origins, a Korean production company is filming a re-creation of the annual April 1 celebration of independence during my visit. On that date every year, tourists can get their passports stamped on the bridge, and government ministers are paid for their service in rare Užupian currency. At this mock celebration, a band plays “When the Saints Go Marching In” as actors on stilts walk alongside cars flying the republic’s flag. I approach two locals cast as extras who, like me, are watching the action.

“I’ve never seen a Lithuanian dressed like this,” says a girl costumed in Victorian fashion. Her companion is wearing a parrot suit.

“Is the parrot customary?” I ask.

“No.” We both laugh.

On my last day I revisit the constitution plaques and wait for other tourists to leave before setting my palm on the Open Hand of Užupis, which is mounted nearby. Tourists lay their hands on this symbol for good luck. It shares its design with the official flag: a hand with a hole through the middle. Some sources cite it as a symbol of refusing bribes, but Ostrovskaja tells me it means “easy come, easy go”—as in, one can’t hold on to material things. I touch it and feel an invisible country slip through my fingers.

In his book Invisible Cities, the Italian journalist and author Italo Calvino writes, “The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.” Before I leave, Cepaitis gives me a book of poetry by a Finnish ambassador. When I open it back home in New York City, a stamp falls out. Its provenance: the Federal Republic of Lostisland.