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Neutral Moresnet
A sliver of shared land that existed for a century because of a zinc mine
For 104 years, a wedge of land of about 3.5 square kilometers sat between the Netherlands, later Belgium, and Prussia, belonging fully to neither. The diplomats who redrew Europe after Napoleon could not agree who should get its prize, a rich zinc mine, so they drew a triangle around the mine and shared it. The result had a mayor, a council, and its own black, white, and blue flag, but no army and no currency of its own. Low taxes and loose rules drew settlers, distillers, and briefly a casino, and in 1908 enthusiasts proposed turning it into the world's first Esperanto-speaking state, Amikejo. Today it is the quiet Belgian town of Kelmis.
Neutral Moresnet was a narrow triangle of rolling, partly wooded ground in the valley of the Geul, a few kilometers southwest of Aachen. Its base ran along the road between the Prussian and Dutch-Belgian villages that both bore the name Moresnet, and its apex touched the Vaalserberg, where the meeting of borders made a rare four-country point. At its center was the Altenberg mine of the Vieille Montagne company, whose calamine ore made it one of Europe's main zinc sources, and whose metal-rich soil still supports a rare zinc violet. Population grew from a few hundred in 1816 to about 3,000 by 1900 and somewhere between 3,500 and 4,700 by 1914, depending on the source. The land is now the municipality of Kelmis in Belgium's German-speaking Community.
The Treaty of Aachen of June 26, 1816, between Prussia and the Netherlands, left the mine district under joint control, with two royal commissioners overseeing a local mayor. Belgium took over the Dutch share after its independence in the 1830s. Residents kept a curious civic status, and for decades the territory functioned as an untidy experiment in shared sovereignty. The mine was exhausted in 1885, and with it went the original reason for the arrangement. A local doctor attempted a postal service with its own stamps in 1886, which Belgium quickly blocked, and the Esperanto project followed two decades later. Germany occupied the area during World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles assigned it to Belgium, which took control on January 10, 1920.