In the 1600s there was a new port being built on the Black Sea in what is now modern Georgia, and the engineers -- really civilians from two local kingdoms (Caucasia was a maelstrom of small kingdoms back then, and really this was a bid by the kingdoms for increased economic relations with the Ottomans) backing the project as well as a local masonry guild -- devised a rather dumb plan to build a large circular canal through the middle of the town rather than a normal wharf, akin to a ship drive-through, but for incoming trading vessels. Once all the provisions were requested and the diagrams were drawn many landowners were informed by port authorities that their buildings would soon be leveled to make way for the canal, as it was going to be quite wide. Some of them were bribed into simply moving their businesses into the brand new merchant district, and some were, to make an understatement, coerced from their homes and businesses. Notably, 5 of these merchants formed a sort of merchant militia and barricaded their shops, and after a 10 day siege against them (one shopkeeper dead, three soldiers injured) there was an agreement that each of the merchants would have exclusive extremely valuable properties on each end of the two main bridges across the canal. So when the canal was finally dug 20 years later and flooded the old shopkeepers demanded their compensation and were of course denied immediately and tried for treason. But during the night of their arrest they broke out of the prison (it is not recorded how, but according to a local diary entry most townsfolk knew of their tenacity) and managed to set the town's own cannons onto the two bridges, wholly scattering them into the waters. Apparently the town just refused to build new bridges after that, because so many local resources had been sunk into the construction, and the kings refused to allocate more time to it due to internal conflicts. So basically a whole new district-sized town was created on the inside of the semicircular canal, politically separated from the outside town, sustained mostly on incoming trade from the Ottomans. They charged exorbitant fees for access to the port, which was a highly convenient rest stop along the Black Sea coast, and of course sold the goods to the surrounding town at apparently unreasonable markups (which formed a small black market for Ottoman goods around those parts). The descendants of two of the merchants from the siege actually still own a lot of land in this district and claim that its actually historically its own kingdom, though obviously this is nonsense since they elected their own officials for most of its existence. But people over there sort of respect the hustle since, well, those guys don't control much of the port economically besides from being landlords; the port and its previous existence as its own "kingdom" is now more of a historical oddity than anything politically worthwhile to stand against/for.
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