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VIENNA (AFP) – Residents of an Austrian village will ring in the new year with a new name, Fugging, after the ridicule of its signs, especially on social media, became too difficult to bear.
They finally got tired of F *** ing, its current name which, according to some experts, dates back to the 11th century.
Minutes of a city council meeting released on Thursday (November 26) showed that the village of about 100 people 350 km east of Vienna will be called Fugging as of January 1, 2021.
An increasing number of English-speaking tourists have stopped to take photos by the sign at the entrance to the town, sometimes making lewd poses to post on social media.
Some have reportedly even stolen the signs, prompting local authorities to use theft-resistant concrete when placing replacements.
Finally, most of the villagers decided that they had had enough.
“I can confirm that the town’s name is being changed,” said Andrea Holzner, mayor of Tarsdorf, the municipality to which the town belongs.
“I really don’t want to say anything else, we have had enough media frenzy about this in the past,” he told the regional daily Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten (OOeN).
According to the Austrian daily Die Presse, the villagers “are fed up with visitors and their bad jokes.” But not everyone seems happy with the impending change.
“Don’t people have a sense of humor these days?” asked an OOeN reader.
Another noted: “They are getting free publicity; they should have been happy to have a fun name.”
The locals had previously found their village in the news after it was the backdrop for a book by Austrian novelist Kurt Palm that was later made into a movie.
The village was first officially inhabited around 1070, but local tradition suggests that a 6th century Bavarian nobleman named Focko founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.
Across the border in Bavaria, in Germany, there is another town called Petting.
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