The Story
The story of Christiania is colorful, long, and filled with battles, victories and defeats. Many of the people who began this “experiment” do not live here anymore, but the dream of a life lived in freedom and the idea of a city ruled by its inhabitants still continues.
You will, probably think the name Christiania has a religious roots. No, not at all! Actually this is the name of a very specific area in the centre of Copenhagen (Denmark) and historically it is closely connected to a barracks of King Christian.
It all began in early 70s, when the city government decided to remove those barracks and built something useful on the area – whether a stadium, whether a market, nobody actually remembers now. The important is that the indignant public on behalf of ten hippies decided to occupy the territory and protect a historical relic (to tell the truth, “the relic” were only a few miserable small brick houses on the coast of marshy lake). The mass media have organized a great show from this incident, and soon all hippies, who had aimlessly loafed across the Europe, directed right to Denmark to support their foreign “comrades”. And when sluggish policemen came to expel the rebellions at last, they were nearly shocked: hundreds of hippies were spread all over the barracks and they didn’t want to leave anymore. This was the birth of Christiania and its first legendary defense of those, who came to create an alternative life based on communal living and freedom.
Times were quite rough then: the police was spreading a tear gas all around and attacking the barricades by helping dogs and cudgels. Accordingly the hippies were protecting themselves by throwing a bricks and “Molotov” cocktails into enemies. Mass-media was almost crying of happiness and broadcast direct reportings from the place of events. All this disgrace continued quite long, till hippies finally decided to write an official letter to the queen of Denmark. The queen supported a noble business of protection of ancient monuments and asked the police to leave hippies in their barracks alone. Although queen wasn’t able to order that simple – there’s a constitutional monarchy in Denmark. However her requests were always executed, probably because she asked very seldom
By this way Christiania got its half-legal status. However hippies weren’t satisfied only by this – soon they declared Christiania as an independent state and the first thing they did in it was drugs legalization. The city government decided not to pay attention to this – it was very stupid to start a second war when the first hasn’t finished yet.
Several years had passed; the “rainbow warriors” had already grown roots in their new home: they’ve painted barracks with pacific-signs and flowers, graveled paths, built few small houses, opened a few cafeterias and ecological epicure. Soon Christiania has turned into a cute “hippical” village controlled by a government of The Common Meeting. The idyll was broken only by one – an extremely high death level.
Once hippies have “sobered up”, looked around and noticed that they now practically lived in a new Europe’s capital of heroin. Half of the founders of an utopian “country of Freedom” by the time have already gone to a cemetery; the third part of the population was drug addict. Heroin killed people even more than any epidemic would; you could find lots of used syringes in the toilets, and the dealers have traded in drugs practically without any fears. But soon hippies have realized current situation and took actions against the drug dealers. The local government declared that everyone who is using heroin or some other “heavy” drugs must take treatment-programs; else they will be thrown out from Christiania. Unfortunately both dealers and the “junkies”(heroin users) seemed absolutely irresponsible: they have flatly refused to leave! This has caused another problem – the beginning of civil war in Christiania, once again with barricades, “Molotov” cocktails and other “fun” stuff. There were even some gun-fights. But this time good hippies have won against the “bad” ones. The drug dealers and “naughty” junkies were expelled and the legislation of village was changed.
So from that time the legal drug in Christiania is only marihuana and it can be sailed only on a special area called “Pusher-street”. The other part of “country” is considered as “clean”, which means you can smoke the “weed” but you cannot trade it. And for an attempt to sell heavy drugs in Christiania you can be seriously beaten. The most amusing is that the “security functions” are carried out by the same sellers of weed – it’s a real benefit to them – the police is not so annoying when there’s no heroin around.