Antau (, , ) is a municipality in the Mattersburg district in the Austrian state of Burgenland. Lying in the Wulka valley, it had 842 inhabitants at the end of 2025 and is home to a significant Burgenland Croat minority alongside a German-speaking majority; the village maintains a local branch of the largest Burgenland Croat cultural association and an associated tamburitza ensemble, and operates bilingual German–Croatian kindergarten and primary schools.
First documented in 1245, Antau was originally a Hungarian-settled village whose name derives from the Hungarian ("ploughed field"). The area had earlier been settled during the Celtic and Roman periods, and the remains of a Roman-era at the municipality's eastern edge have been individually protected as a monument since 2016. Through the medieval era the village was divided among several manorial lords, and in the early 16th century much of its population was lost during Ottoman military campaigns; Croatian settlers were subsequently brought in to prevent the village's abandonment, establishing the mixed German–Croatian character it retains today. Along with the rest of Burgenland, Antau remained part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1921, when it became part of Austria. After suffering losses in both world wars, the village was merged with the neighbouring municipality of Hirm in 1971 under a statewide municipal restructuring law, a move that met vocal local opposition, including a tractor protest outside the state parliament in Eisenstadt; Antau regained its independence in 1991.
The St. Andrew parish church, whose current building dates largely to an 1809–1810 reconstruction and an 1854 rebuilding after fires, is the village's principal landmark; it is one of eleven individually protected heritage objects listed by the Federal Monuments Office in the municipality. Antau's municipal coat of arms, granted in 1991, depicts a tower and ears of grain above a mill-wheel, symbols drawn from the village's grain-growing economy and its former mills on the Wulka. Antau received a bronze award in the village category of Entente Florale Europe in 2002. Historically an agricultural village, its economy shifted over the 20th century toward commuting to nearby urban centres; as of late 2024 the municipality had 72 registered business establishments. The municipal council has been governed by the ÖVP since Antau's re-establishment as an independent municipality in 1991, with Frank Wiemer serving as mayor since 2022. The village's football club, Sportvereinigung Antau, was founded in 1930, and the former Austrian Bundesliga goalkeeper Thomas Borenitsch was raised in Antau and began his career at the club.
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Etymology The origin of the placename Antau reflects the settlement's early Hungarian population. The village's Hungarian name derived from Szántó, meaning "ploughed field" or "tilled land", reflecting a pattern common to originally Hungarian-settled placenames in eastern Austria between 800 and 1200, in which the initial Hungarian s sound was rendered in German as ts. This initial consonant was later reanalysed as the Middle High German preposition ze ("at"), leaving Antau as the apparent standalone name. The Burgenland municipality of Andau, in the Seewinkel, shares the same etymological origin, though the two villages are unrelated in location. To distinguish it from Andau, the modern Hungarian form of the name, reflecting Antau's position on the Wulka, is Selegszántó. The Croatian name of the village is Otava.
Geography Antau lies in the Wulka valley in the Austrian state of Burgenland, directly on the Wulka, the only river that flows into Lake Neusiedl. The municipality lies at an elevation of 189 metres and consists of a single settlement and cadastral community of the same name; Antau is the only locality within the municipal area. The municipal territory covers approximately 875 hectares (8.75 km2), with elevations ranging from about 170 metres at its lowest point to 239 metres at its highest. It is situated in the district of Mattersburg, within the wider Eisenstadt region of northern Burgenland. Neighbouring municipalities include Hirm, with which Antau was administratively merged between 1971 and 1991 (see ), and Wulkaprodersdorf, whose railway station partly lies on Antau's cadastral territory (see ).
Climate Antau lies in a transitional climate zone characteristic of eastern Austria, with warm summers and cold winters influenced by the Pannonian lowlands to the east. The nearest station with a full 1991–2020 climate normal record is Eisenstadt Nordost, roughly 8 km to the northwest at a comparable elevation of 184 metres, which recorded an annual mean temperature of 10.8 °C and average annual precipitation of 688 mm over that period. July is the warmest month, with a mean temperature of 21.4 °C, and January the coldest, at 0.4 °C; the station recorded an average of about 73 summer days (days reaching 25 °C or above) and 71 frost days per year over the period.
History
Early settlement Archaeological finds made during clay-extraction work in the 19th century indicate that the area of present-day Antau was inhabited in prehistoric times, when it lay within the sphere of the Celtic hillfort settlement on the Schwarzenbacher Burgberg, part of the Celtic kingdom of Noricum. Under Roman rule the site fell within the province of Pannonia, and Roman-era graves have repeatedly been uncovered during later construction work. The remains of a Roman-era villa rustica at the eastern edge of the modern municipal boundary, known since field surveys in the 1970s, are discussed further under . Local historians have suggested the settlement may have originated as a Roman villa rustica.
Medieval period Antau was first mentioned in documentary sources in 1245. Between the 13th and 18th centuries the village was repeatedly divided among several manorial lords. In the High Middle Ages it was held by the Osl family, later passing to a Seifried of Antau and then to the Kanizsai family, before eventually coming into the possession of the Esterházy family. A second, smaller settlement within the modern municipal area, variously recorded as Bikifölde or Bikifeulde and later known as Weixlgut, was likewise divided among several owners over the medieval period. A 1361 dispute over part of these lands saw retainers of Nikolaus of Mattersdorf forcibly seize the holding of a local noble identified as Johannes, a former ban of Dalmatia and Croatia; in 1396, the co-owners of the remaining Bikifölde lands and an associated mill on the Wulka sold their holdings to the lords of Pöttelsdorf. Parts of the Bikifölde lands later passed to the Franciscan monastery in Eisenstadt. A parish church dedicated to St. Andrew is first attested in the late 14th century. Toward the end of the medieval period, the village faced a risk of complete depopulation, a fate historians believe befell Bikifölde, partly driven by emigration to wine-growing communities in the region.
Ottoman era and Croatian settlement In the early 16th century, a large part of Antau's population was lost during Ottoman military campaigns. To prevent the village's complete abandonment, Croatian settlers were brought in, part of a broader, multi-decade wave of Croatian migration into what is now Burgenland and adjoining parts of western Hungary during the 16th century, driven by the destabilisation of the region during the Ottoman–Habsburg wars. Estimates of the total number of Croatian settlers involved in this migration vary considerably among historians, ranging from roughly 20,000 to as many as 100,000 across the wider settlement area. According to a linguistic-historical overview of the community, the modern Burgenland Croat identity and its literary language developed from this 16th-century settlement wave over the following centuries, incorporating German and Hungarian elements alongside its Chakavian Croatian base. The newly settled Croatian community in Antau was Roman Catholic and was served exclusively by Croatian-speaking parish priests. Antau remained a mixed-language community into the modern era, one of relatively few such settlements among the Croatian villages of Burgenland, most of which developed as linguistically uniform.
Hungarian rule to 1921 Along with the rest of what later became Burgenland, Antau remained part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1920–21, forming part of the German-speaking western Hungarian region known as Deutsch-Westungarn. Since 1898, Hungarian-language administrative policy required the use of the Hungarian place name Selegszántó, as part of the Magyarization policy pursued by the government in Budapest. Following the Treaty of Trianon and the transfer of the territory to Austria, Antau became part of the newly created state of Burgenland in 1921.
20th century Following Burgenland's incorporation into Austria in 1921, local affairs in Antau continued to be shaped in large part by the parish priest. During the 1920s, donations from a pair of brothers who had emigrated from the village and become wealthy in the United States funded significant improvements to the parish church, including its electrification and the acquisition of pews, two bells, a side altar, and a high altar. The same parish priest also founded the village's local Raiffeisen credit cooperative in 1925.
Antau suffered military losses in both world wars: 36 men from the village were killed in the First World War, and the Second World War cost the village 34 dead and 17 missing. At the end of the Second World War, Antau was occupied by Soviet troops, and postwar reconstruction proceeded slowly owing to the occupation and a shortage of financial resources.
The village nonetheless experienced steady, gradual growth until 1971, when, under Burgenland's statewide (Municipal Structure Improvement Act), which took effect on 1 January 1971, Antau was merged with the neighbouring municipality of Hirm to form the joint municipality of Hirm-Antau, with its administrative seat at Hirm. The wider reform reduced the number of municipalities statewide from 319 to either 128 or 138, depending on the source, and sources likewise differ on how many municipalities were dissolved and consolidated in the process; Atlas Burgenland's account of the reform gives both sets of figures in different places without reconciling them.