Fucking is an Austrian village located 33 km north of Salzburg and four km east of the German border in Upper Austria. Apparently, the Fucking village has been in existence since at least 1070 AD and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. The “ing” is an old German suffix indicating there are people attached to the root word; thus Fucking means place of Focko’s people. It seems the local inhabitants have been doing a pretty good job of living up to their namesake all these years as the Fucking village has a population of 107 inhabitants.

The Fucking village’s most famous feature is a traffic sign with its name on it, beside which tourists often stop to have their photograph taken. As one can well imagine the Fucking traffic sign is commonly stolen. The municipal authorities have had to spend significant amounts of Fucking money to replace the stolen signs.

In response to the frequent sign thefts, the Fucking residents held a plebiscite in 2004 on weather to change the village’s name. However the residents voted against doing so. According to the Fucking mayor, Siegfried Hauppl:

We had a vote last year on whether to rename the town, but decided to keep it as it is. After all, Fucking has existed for 800 years, probably when a Mr Fuck or the Fuck family moved into the area. The ‘ing’ was added as a word for settlement.

In August 2005, the road signs were replaced with theft-resistant sign welded to steel and secured in concrete to prevent further chances of the sign being stolen. It appears that the new theft-resistant signs have solved the Fucking problem as few thefts have occurred since.