The Nobel Foundation, managers of  the Nobel Prizes, on Tuesday cancelled its traditional December banquet due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Nobel week will not be as it usually is due to the current pandemic. This is a very special year when everyone needs to make sacrifices and adapt to completely new circumstances,” Lars Heikensten, Director of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement.

Heikensten added that the laureates would be highlighted in “different ways” along with “their discoveries and works”.

This is the first time since 1956 that the banquet has been cancelled.

The Nobel Banquet traditionally marks the end of the Nobel Week in December, when the year’s prize winners are invited to Stockholm for talks and the award ceremony.

Traditionally, the prize-winners join the Swedish royal family and some 1,300 guests for the banquet at Stockholm’s City Hall after the award ceremony — held on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the prizes’ founder Alfred Nobel.

The winners, except Peace Prize laureates who are honoured in Oslo, also usually give speeches during the dinner.

The announcement of the prizes (Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, then Economics) will still be held scheduled between 5 and 12 October.

The Nobel banquet was last cancelled in 1956 to avoid inviting the Soviet ambassador because of the repression of the Hungarian Revolution.

The banquet was also cancelled during the two world wars, and in 1907 and 1924.