Det Ny Samfund — The New Society — was founded in Copenhagen in 1968, and by 1970 it wanted somewhere to test what it had been arguing for. The models were Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, but the ground was nothing like either: flat, sandy, wind-scoured Jutland, a farming district where a few thousand young people arriving with tents constituted a genuine population event. Officially and locally the site is Frøstruplejren, after the nearest village. The organisers called it Thylejren, and that is the name that stuck, even though the camp sits about a kilometre east of the boundary of Thy proper — a distinction that matters mainly to people from Thy.

The summer was not peaceful. On 30 August 1970, fifteen people from the camp occupied Hjardemål Church, about ten kilometres away, intending to hold it for a week. They held it for part of an afternoon. Local fishermen and residents forced their way in, police used tear gas, and it was over the same day. Thirteen of the occupiers were fined. Afterwards the camp collected 5,100 kroner and handed it to the parish priest. Worse followed: fifty officers with dogs were needed to keep camp dwellers and local young men apart after the camp's shop and electrical system were damaged. Both sides had a case worth understanding. A parish church is not a stage, and the people who stormed it were defending something they had inherited. The occupiers were young, deliberately provocative, and entirely wrong about how that would be received in a fishing district in Thy.

Anyone can hold a commune in July. What Thylejren actually proved, it proved in the cold. A large collective ran from September to November 1970 and then thinned out. By 1974 four people were wintering on the site. In 1975–76 it was seven. In 1976–77 a group formed a survival collective they named Nordlyset, the northern lights, and twenty people stayed the whole year. Numbers reached around eighty by 1979 and then settled near a hundred, children included. That same year the residents did something quietly decisive: they moved Det Ny Samfund's headquarters out of Copenhagen and onto the camp itself. Control passed from the people who had organised a festival to the people living on the land year-round.

The houses went up without building permits, which put the settlement in breach of local by-laws almost immediately. In 1978 eight of them were ordered demolished. Ten new ones were built the same year. The residents never accepted the ruling, paid their two-hundred-kroner fines into frozen accounts, and carried on. Through the 1980s they did the unglamorous work that turns an encampment into a place — wiring the houses, running water to them, bringing DIY structures up to a standard an inspector could sign off. By the 1990s most homes had reached stable legal status. Becoming ordinary took roughly twenty years of refusing to move.

Det Ny Samfund still owns the land, and the association is now essentially the residents. Decisions are made by consensus where possible and by vote where not. The rules are short and they are enforced: no hard drugs, no violence, no theft, no vandalism, no fighting dogs. In the 1990s the place acquired the infrastructure of an actual village — an ecological buying cooperative and shop called Bixen, a café, a pub — and it belongs to L.Ø.S., the Danish national association of ecological communities. The organised summer festivals stopped after 1986. Seventy people lived here permanently in 2011, sixty-five in 2020. English Wikipedia files Thylejren under micronations, which rather overstates it; there is no border and no passport. What there is instead is a piece of Danish farmland that a group of people bought in 1970 and have been running on their own terms ever since — one of the longest-lived alternative communities in the country, and by now simply a small village with an unusual founding document.