Fugging hell: tired of mockery, Austrian village changes name

Residents of an Austrian village will ring in the new year under a new name – Fugging – after ridicule of their signposts, especially on social media, became too much to bear.

They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century.

Minutes from a municipal council meeting published on Thursday showed that the village of about 100 people, 350km (215 miles) east of Vienna, will be named Fugging from 1 January 2021.

Increasing numbers of English-speaking tourists have made a point of stopping in to snap pictures of themselves by the signpost at the entrance to the village, sometimes striking lascivious poses for social media.

Some have reportedly even stolen the signposts, leading the local authorities to use theft-resistant concrete when putting up replacements.

Finally, a majority of the villagers decided they had had enough.

“I can confirm that the village is being renamed,” said Andrea Holzner, the mayor of Tarsdorf, the municipality to which the village belongs.

“I really don’t want to say anything more – we’ve had enough media frenzy about this in the past,” she told the regional daily Oberösterreichische Nachrichten (OOeN).

According to the Austrian daily Die Presse, the villagers, known as Fuckingers, “have had enough of visitors and their bad jokes”.

But not everybody seems happy about the impending change.

“Don’t people have any sense of humour these days?” asked one OOeN reader.

Another noted: “They’re getting free publicity – they ought to have been happy to have a funny name.”

Locals had previously found their village in the news after it was the backdrop for a book by Austrian novelist Kurt Palm, which was later turned into a film named Bad Fucking.

The village was first officially inhabited in about 1070, but local lore suggests that a sixth-century Bavarian nobleman called Focko actually founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.

Just across the border in Bavaria in Germany there is a village called Petting.