Rust

The town first appears in 1317 as Ceel, in a deed of King Charles I of Hungary, a name taken from the Hungarian word for elm; the German Rust is a translation of it, and the modern Hungarian Ruszt was in turn borrowed back from the German. Rust received market rights around 1470; in 1524 Queen Mary of Hungary granted its growers the right to brand their barrels with a crowned "R".

Rust was walled in 1512 but destroyed during the Ottoman wars in 1529 and 1532; a second ring wall followed in 1614, and much of it still stands. By the end of the 16th century the town was almost entirely Protestant. In 1649 it bought its freedom from feudal subjection, paying the Habsburgs 60,000 gold florins and 500 buckets of its best wine — nearly 30,000 litres of Ruster Ausbruch — and on 3 December 1681 Leopold I made it a royal free town at the diet held in Sopron.

With the rest of Burgenland, Rust passed from Hungary to Austria in 1921, and because it was already a free town it became the country's smallest statutory city. Under Nazi rule it lost that status from 1938, its three Jewish families were robbed and driven out or murdered, and Roma were deported to camps; the Red Army arrived on 2 April 1945. The old town was listed by UNESCO with the Lake Neusiedl landscape in 2001.

Rust calls itself the town of storks. The white stork is treated almost as an emblem across the whole Lake Neusiedl area, and in Rust the birds nest on the chimneys and roofs of the old town. The old town itself is the other point of pride: in 1975 it was chosen, with Salzburg and Krems, as one of Austria's three model towns, praised for a historic centre that had not been restored as a museum but was still lived and worked in, and its houses remain homes, wineries and shops.

Protestant history is part of the town's identity. The present Catholic parish church was permitted in 1647 as a Protestant church, and the town's Reformation past brought the European title it received in 2019. Music has a place too: the small fishermen's church, the Fischerkirche, is used for concerts each summer for its acoustics, and since 1999 the town has hosted an international guitar festival with concerts, master classes and a competition.

Wine runs through the town's calendar and conversation. Since 1989 the Austrian Wine Academy, the first in the German-speaking world, has been based in a 17th-century house in the town, and Rust has served as the setting and filming location of the television series Der Winzerkönig, about a winemaking family.

Rust had 1,918 inhabitants at the start of 2026, slightly fewer than its peak of 1,984 in 2021, which makes it the smallest administrative district and statutory city in Austria. It governs itself through its own town charter and council, while its police station reports to the Eisenstadt command and it lies within Eisenstadt's district court. Gerold Stagl has been mayor since 2012.

Wine is the town's living. Its vineyards cover about 450 hectares on the hills above the lake and belong to the Leithaberg wine area, and the old town's houses still serve their original purpose as homes and working premises for the families who own them. Tourism adds summer visitors who come for the lake, the beach, sailing and the cycle routes, and day trippers from Vienna who come to walk the old town and sit in the wine taverns.

The rhythm of the year follows the vines and the lake: pruning in winter, summer evenings on the shore, the harvest in autumn and the new wine around St. Martin's Day in November. The town has a kindergarten, a primary and a lower secondary school. The lake's water level, which falls sharply in droughts, is a recurring worry for the whole shore.

Rust's fame is a sweet wine. Ausbruch is an Austrian quality grade for dessert wine made from grapes affected by noble rot, ranked between Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese, and Ruster Ausbruch is the best known of all; the category entered Austrian wine law in 1970 to recognise a method long used around Rust, and since 2020 Ruster Ausbruch has had its own protected designation. The town's history is bound up with it: it was partly with Ausbruch that the burghers paid for their freedom in 1649.

The vineyards also produce dry wines, and the reds of the area include Blaufränkisch, a late-ripening dark grape whose wines are typically rich in tannin and often spicy. Austrian wine as a whole is mostly white, but the sweeter wines made around Lake Neusiedl are among its specialities.

The everyday place to drink them is the Heuriger, a tavern where winemakers serve their own new wine under a special licence for part of the year, with simple food alongside. In Rust many of these are in the courtyards of the old town, and wines can be tasted and bought directly at the cellar door of the family wineries.