A massive fireworks display took place on August 27 under calm skies in Budapest after an inaccurate rain forecast caused a postponement last week -- leading to the firing of Hungary’s top meteorologists.
The rescheduled event -- billed as Europe’s largest fireworks show -- was originally planned for Hungary’s national holiday a week earlier.
Hungary's top two weather officials were fired on August 22 after a mistaken rain forecast prompted the postponement and caused a political uproar.
Weather service chief Kornelia Radics and her deputy Gyula Horvath lost their jobs.
The dismissals followed harsh criticism of the meteorological service in Hungary's government-aligned media.
The planned display was to depict “a condensed chronicle of a thousand years from the birth of Christian Hungary to the present day, focusing on the lessons of national values,” according to the event’s website.
It was billed as a “tableau of the great periods and significant moments of Hungarian history, emphasizing the important national values that can also provide a moral lesson for everyday life.”
Right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has sought to promote an image of Hungary as a bastion protecting what he called Christian values and national traditions, and built a wall at its southern border in 2015 to prevent the transit of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East.
But Orban's government has also been accused by the European Union of corruption, nepotism, and antidemocratic tendencies.
Climate Without Borders, an international group of weather presenters, issued a letter signed by 76 members from 48 countries expressing support for the fired forecasters.