Czechoslovak legionaries took control of the city on 1 January 1919. Six weeks later, on 12 February, German- and Hungarian-speaking inhabitants demonstrated against the new order and the legionaries opened fire on the unarmed crowd; people were killed. On 27 March 1919 the city was officially renamed Bratislava. The name was a nineteenth-century scholarly coinage, worked back out of the old chronicle form Brezalauspurc, rather than a word the city's own inhabitants had been using: Pressburg, Pozsony and Prešporok all disappeared into one new name at a stroke. Nothing on the map of this country shows more clearly how completely the year 1918 changed it.Československí legionári prevzali mesto 1. januára 1919. O šesť týždňov, 12. februára, demonštrovali nemecky a maďarsky hovoriaci obyvatelia proti novým pomerom a legionári do neozbrojeného davu vystrelili; boli mŕtvi. 27. marca 1919 mesto úradne premenovali na Bratislavu. To meno bolo vedeckým výmyslom 19. storočia, odvodeným spätne zo starej kronikárskej podoby Brezalauspurc, a nie slovom, ktoré by obyvatelia mesta bežne používali: Pressburg, Pozsony aj Prešporok naraz zmizli v jednom novom názve. Nič na mape tejto krajiny neukazuje tak jasne, ako dôkladne ju rok 1918 zmenil.
