Thursday, December 10, 2020

No more Fucking in Austria

No, that doesn't mean that people in Vienna or Innsbruck can't have sex anymore. It means that a small village in the corner of Austria is changing its, eh, peculiar name:

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.

Legend has it that the village, pronounced "foo-king," was founded in the sixth century by a Bavarian nobleman named Focko.

The village isn't too far north of Salzburg, and Corinne and I had always joked about visiting this village during one of our trips there just to say that we had "been to Fucking, Austria." But that's exactly the problem: too many English speakers were inundating the tiny village, taking pictures, stealing signs, and giggling about the town's name, even though it doesn't mean in German what it means in English.

Villagers had simply gotten tired of Fucking.

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