Residents of an Austrian village will ring in the new year under a new name – Fugging – after ridicule and repeated theft of their signposts 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 will be named Fugging from 1 January 2021.
Located 260km (161 miles) west of Vienna, Fucking has in recent years become a popular stop-off point for tourists, particularly from English-speaking countries, who snap pictures of themselves by the signposts at the entrance and exit to the village and post them on social media.
Dozens of signposts have been stolen, forcing the local authorities to put up the sign at a 2m height and embed it in theft-resistant concrete when putting up replacements.
Finally, the villagers, known as Fuckingers, “had enough of visitors and their bad jokes”, wrote Austrian daily Die Prese.
“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).
Villagers could come to miss the international fame they have come to enjoy.
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.
In 2010, a brewery in the Black Forest managed to register a pale lager by the name of Fucking Hell after convincing the European Union’s Trade Marks and Designs Registration Office that it was a reference to the Austrian village rather than an expletive.
The village formed part of the itinerary of a 2016 episode of Jeremy Clarkson’s Amazon Prime series The Grand Tour, along with the Bavarian municipalities Kissing and Petting, as well as the Berlin district Wedding.
The village was first officially inhabited in about 1070, probably named after a local nobleman called Adalpert von Vucckingen, though local lore suggests that a sixth-century Bavarian aristocrat called Focko actually founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.
There has been no confirmation whether the neighbouring hamlets of Oberfucking and Unterfucking will be affected by the name-change.
