Bratislava will traditionally welcome the New Year with open-air festivities in the city centre, ending with grandiose fireworks on the Danube River. Other regional capitals have either not planned fireworks or have cancelled them. Instead they have sent the money saved to relieve people affected by a deadly gas blast in an apartment block in Prešov in early December.
Bratislava Mayor Matúš Vallo realises that opinions about fireworks would always differ. He recalled that in the past, celebrations of the arrival of the New Year used to resemble a war zone in Bratislava, when groups of people lit their own small fireworks in the city centre and everywhere were broken bottles.