Residents of an Austrian village will call in the New Year under a new name – Fugging – after their banners, especially on social media, are mocked by them, too much to bear.
They are finally tired of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century.
Minutes from a city council meeting published on Thursday showed that the village of about 100 people, 350 kilometers (215 miles) west of Vienna, would be called Voging from January 1, 2021.
An increasing number of English-speaking tourists made sure to stop to take pictures of themselves with a sign at the entrance to the village, sometimes posting cute photos on social media.
Some have reportedly stolen the signs, leading local authorities to use burglar-resistant concrete when developing alternatives.
Finally, the majority of the villagers decided they had enough.
“I can confirm that the name of the village has been changed,” said Andrea Holzner, mayor of Tarsdorf, the municipality to which the village belongs.
“I really don’t want to say anything else – we’ve had enough of the media frenzy about this in the past,” she told Oberösterreichische Nachrichten (OOeN).
According to Austrian daily Die Presse, the villagers, known as “Fuckingers”, are “tired of the visitors and their bad jokes.”
But not everyone seems happy with the impending change.
“Don’t people have any sense of humor these days?” One OOeN reader asked.
Another noted, “They’re getting free publicity – they should have been happy to have a funny name.”
Locals had previously found their village in the news after it was the backdrop to a book by Austrian novelist Kurt Palme, which was later turned into a movie called Bad Fucking.
The village was first inhabited around 1070, but local traditions indicate that a 6th-century Bavarian nobleman called Focko actually founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.
There is a village called Petting across the border in Bavaria in Germany.
