Austrian Village Votes to Change Troublesome Name

Villagers were tired of prank calls, but their name change draws the ire of another village's mayor

Sick of all the prank calls and snickering tourists, the village of F---ing in upper Austria has decided to change its name. But another village that made the same name change almost 200 years ago is having none of it.

The roughly 100 residents of the unfortunately named upper Austrian village have endured gawking visitors ever since American servicemen stationed nearby at the end of World War II discovered it. The visitors had reportedly made a sport of having sex beside street signs bearing the village's name, and the signs were frequently stolen.

"The phone calls are really the final straw," Mayor Franz Meindl said. "We have a good community. It's only ever the name that causes us troubles."

The village voted Tuesday to change its name to Fugging, despite having voted down a name change back in 1996, according to the British newspaper the Mirror.

The trouble, however, is that another village by that name already exists 200 miles south.

"We think one Fugging in Austria is enough," said that village's mayor, Andreas Dockner, the Mirror reported.

He said his village has been going by the name Fugging since changing its name from F---ing back in 1836. He speculated that his village's former name might have proved troublesome much earlier than its northern neighbor's did because Fugging is much closer to Vienna and so would have had many more Englishmen around to mock it.

"We are very proud of our name. But it is our name now," he told the Mirror. He said he advised the other village "not to change anything."

According to the Telegraph, the pair of villages' original names came from a modernized version of Focko, a Sixth Century Bavarian nobleman.

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