Bleiburg (Slovene: Pliberk) is a small town in the south Austrian state of Carinthia (Koroška), south-east of Klagenfurt, in the district of Völkermarkt, some four kilometres (2.5 miles) from the border with Slovenia.

The border town is located in the valley of the Feistritz creek, a right tributary of the Drava, north of the Peca massif of the Karawanks mountain range.

In spite of the overwhelming Slovene majority in the area, the town remained in Austria after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire along national/ethnic lines after the end of World War I.

In the Carinthian Plebiscite of 1920, in fact, the inhabitants of southern Carinthia rejected the proposal to unite with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the later Yugoslavia), and chose to remain in Austria.

[5] In February 2006, the Carinthian governor Jörg Haider made a great stir by personally moving the German sign for a few meters, hoping to create a new legal situation that would require a new decision of the Constitutional Court.

In February 2007, the Carinthian Regional Prosecution started a legal procedure against Governor Haider and his deputy Gerhard Dörfler for official misconduct in the case of the Bleiburg place sign.