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On 1 January 2021, a village in Upper Austria called Fucking became a village in Upper Austria called Fugging. The council of Tarsdorf, the municipality it belongs to, voted for the change in November 2020. The reasons were stolen road signs, tourists lying down in the road in front of the ones that were left and twenty years of internet jokes that the hundred or so people who lived there had stopped laughing at some time around 2005.

The mayor's full statement to the press was that she could confirm the village was being renamed and would rather not say anything else. Hard to argue with.

TL;DR

• Local legend traces the name to a sixth-century Bavarian called Focko. The village is in the records by 1070. Nobody minded the spelling for centuries, because nobody there spoke English.
• The trouble started with Allied soldiers after 1945 and never stopped. By 2000 the signs were going missing, at 300 euros each.
• In 2004 the residents voted to keep the name. In 2005 they welded the signs to steel and set them in concrete. In 2009 they discussed cameras.
• Then came the beer, the crime novel, the hoax, Jeremy Clarkson, the porn site and TikTok. The council gave up in November 2020.
• Meanwhile Instagram had banned the hashtag. The name was everywhere except where it could be written down.

Focko's Lot

Local legend says a Bavarian nobleman called Focko settled a patch of land in what's now the Innviertel sometime in the sixth century, near the German border and about 40 kilometers north of Salzburg. The people who lived there became Focko's people, and the suffix for that is "-ing." Reading in England is Reada's people. Nobody in Berkshire has ever had to concrete a sign.

What's documented is that the place is in the records by 1070 as Vucchingen, then Fukching in 1303 and Fugkhing in 1532. The spelling wandered for centuries before it settled on the version that would eventually require a police response. The locals say it closer to "fooking," which will matter later.

For the better part of a thousand years, nothing happened. Thirty-odd houses, some farms, a sign.

The Soldiers Find the Sign

After 1945, British and American troops stationed in Salzburg discovered a village under an hour away with the funniest name they'd ever seen, and did what anyone would: they drove there and took photographs of each other next to it.

The soldiers went home. The habit didn't. It passed to backpackers, then to stag parties, then to anyone with a camera phone and an afternoon. Mostly British, according to everyone who was asked. A guesthouse manager told AFP in 2005 that she'd had to explain to one of them that there were no Fucking postcards. The local police chief told the Telegraph that it might be very amusing for the British, but Fucking was simply Fucking to them.

The Signs

By 2000 the signs were going missing. Each one cost around 300 euros to replace and the municipality was replacing them often enough that the cost came up in interviews.

In 2004 the residents voted on changing the name and voted no. The mayor at the time put it plainly: everyone there knew what it meant in English, "but for us Fucking is Fucking, and it's going to stay Fucking." In 2005 the eight signs on the roads into the village were welded to steel posts and set in concrete. In 2009 the council discussed cameras. A resident who started selling T-shirts reading "I like Fucking in Austria" was asked by his neighbors to stop, and did.

None of it helped, because the problem was never the signs.

Everybody Wants a Piece

In January 2010 the EU trademark office allowed a pale lager called Fucking Hell to go ahead, overturning its own refusal from 2007. The applicants had pointed out that Fucking was an Austrian village and that "Hell" is simply German for a pale beer. The village objected. The beer shipped.

The Austrian writer Kurt Palm published a crime novel called Bad Fucking. In 2012 reports went round that the village was about to change its name. Tarsdorf's mayor said no change was under discussion. The episode did surface the other Fugging, a village of about ninety people in Lower Austria, whose mayor said he saw no problem with sharing the name. He would get the chance.

In 2017 The Grand Tour did a road trip that took in Wank, Kissing, Petting and Fucking, an itinerary that wrote itself. In 2018 a large adult website declared the village a "Premium Place" and offered every resident free access, which is the kind of gift you can't return. By 2020 TikTok had arrived and visitors were dancing in the road and blocking traffic. That year two Danish visitors filmed themselves going door to door in the village, and the video is widely reported to have been the last straw.

The Hashtag Was Banned

Instagram blocked #fucking. When the Austrian tech site futurezone covered the renaming in 2020, it noted that plenty of posts about the village never made it past social media filters, and that the memes lived on 9gag and Reddit instead. It didn't stop anyone. Photos of the sign went round under #fuckingaustria and whatever else people could think of. Social media made the sign famous, and the people living behind it got the visitors.

The banned hashtag is the Scunthorpe problem with a postcode: a filter matches a string and reads nothing else. The village wasn't the only place to meet it. In March 2021, two months after Fugging took effect, Facebook removed the official page of Bitche, a French town of five thousand people in the Moselle. The town assumed its name had tripped something and spent three weeks filling in forms that went nowhere. The page came back in April, after a journalist from Politico asked Facebook about it, and Facebook said its systems had analyzed the page incorrectly. In the meantime the town had set up a replacement page under its postcode, "Mairie 57230."

Nobody has suggested the filters were part of Tarsdorf's decision. The reasons given were the visitors, the filming and the jokes. It is still a strange kind of fame, to be known everywhere by a word that the places making you famous won't let anyone type.

Fugging

The decision was published in late November 2020 and took effect on 1 January 2021. Mayor Andrea Holzner confirmed it in one sentence and declined to add a second, saying there had been enough media frenzy already. Die Presse reported that the villagers had had enough of visitors and their bad jokes. The one official justification was linguistic: Fugging is how people there have always said it.

The Lower Austrian Fugging, which had said in 2012 it didn't mind sharing, now shared. Within weeks, in December 2020, somebody had altered the new signs back to the old spelling. One of the last original signs went to the Haus der Geschichte Österreich in Vienna, the national museum of contemporary history, where it is presumably not welded to anything. By September 2021 the mayor reported that the disruptions had stopped.

It worked. The tourists went to Petting.

Where [@fuck.it] Lands

We kept the word. We put it on the front door, on the mail servers and on every address we hand out, and we did it on purpose. A village of a hundred people inherited the name and spent twenty years as a photo opportunity, which is a different situation entirely, and their decision was the right one for them.

Ours was the right one for us. The word gets attention, and what people find when they look is a serious email service run by people who care about privacy, uptime and getting mail delivered. The name does the introduction. The service does the rest. We wrote about where the word itself comes from a while ago. The earliest known written uses of the English word turn up centuries after the village first appears in the records.

So Fugging gets its quiet, and we're happy for them. Somebody has to keep the sign up.

Sources & further reading: France 24 / AFP: Fugging hell: tired of mockery, Austrian village changes name · ORF: Gemeinde Fucking ändert Ortsnamen in Fugging · The Irish Times: Austria bids farewell to Fucking after a millennium of misunderstandings · futurezone: Das Internet nimmt Abschied von Fucking · Snopes: Was Fucking renamed? · Wikipedia: Fugging, Upper Austria · Wikipedia: Fucking Hell (beer) · Euronews: French town Bitche has Facebook page removed in error

Related reads: The Scunthorpe Problem: A Short History of Filters That Can't Read · The Fucking History of "Fuck" · The (Bleep)ing History of Censor Tones