Republic of Vevčani

The Republic of Vevčani (Република Вевчани, ), also known as the Independent Republic of Vevčani, was a short lived self-proclaimed country on the territory of North Macedonia after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and is now a symbolic micronation. The residents of the same-named village created their own state after the Vevčani Emergency in 1987, when the Communist government attempted to redirect the water springs of the village. The self-proclaimed republic was declared on 19 September 1991. They made their own coat of arms – two harlequins dancing over a cauldron. They also issued red passports. A currency was created as a souvenir. On 8 April 1993, Vevčani fell under the jurisdiction of the Struga Municipality and the republic came to an end. In 2000 it was recreated as a model country to attract tourism.

History
During the Vevčani Emergency, the police used electric batons for the first time in the former Yugoslavia to stop a protest. The protests set up barricades and were beaten for weeks until the government backed off. On 19 September 1991, 11 days after the declaration of independence of Macedonia, the people of Vevčani declared it a state. They stashed their guns and demanded to be left alone.

In 2002 The New York Times said: "Their village is just a dot on the map, but the people here consider it a country in its own right: a self-proclaimed Balkan state that has been defying authority for more than a decade.

There is a lot of whimsy in applying the term republic to Vevcani, a mountain hamlet tucked in the southwestern corner of Macedonia just over the border from Albania.

But nationhood is a state of mind for the 2,500 villagers, who say their independent spirit helped them preserve the peace when much of the rest of the Balkans disintegrated into warfare in the 1990s.

We may seem radical in our ways, but we were determined not to let anyone manipulate us, one villager, Nenad Batkovski, said over coffee in Macedonia's capital, Skopje, where he is Vevcani's self-styled consul.

Vevcani is a Christian village surrounded by Muslim neighbors. That is often a recipe for disaster in the ethnically tense Balkans, but the village lives peacefully with its neighbors." The Vevčani created their own currency, the ličnik (личник), to hand out as souvenirs. The currency came in 8 denominations of 1, 2, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000. The designer was Simun Lesoski.

On 7 August 2020, the anniversary of the Emergency, in cooperation with the mayor of the municipality, the cryptocurrency "crypto ličnik" was launched. It was made by Jordan Stojanovski. This is the official cryptocurrency of the now symbolic country.