Have you ever imagined that the sun that brightens our day would never rise in the morning?
What if I told you that people in ancient times were stuck in this for 18 months...
From 529 AD onwards, many ancient cities, especially in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, were abandoned.
The reason for these mass migrations, which were particularly concentrated in the Mediterranean civilizations, was the large-scale earthquakes that initially occurred in the Lycian region. It is known that the magnitude of these earthquakes reached up to 8. However, no one could predict where the disaster that would follow the earthquakes and drag people into real death and darkness would come from...
In 536 AD, under the shadow of these great earthquakes, the event known as the silent period occurred, which ended with the sun darkening all over the world. During this global darkness that would last 18 months; there were no days, crops and food could not grow, and in China, known for its warmth, it snowed in the middle of the summer. Procopius, a historian of Palestinian origin who lived during the reign of Justinian I in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), recorded the prolonged darkening of the sun, just like during a solar eclipse.
Humanity was faced with a global famine that was felt all over the world, from Asia to the Mediterranean and even Central America. People who managed to survive during this period became more vulnerable to diseases because they were deprived of sunlight for long periods of time.
A study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews investigated the cause of this global darkness and discovered a series of volcanic eruptions, the first of which occurred in 536. According to the study, “ Ice samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica show that the amount of sulfur gases in the atmosphere increased as a result of two major volcanic eruptions that occurred in 536 and 539/540. It is estimated that the first eruption occurred in 535 or early 536, and the second in 539-540. The second eruption caused cold weather to continue in the Northern Hemisphere until 550.” Indeed, research conducted by TÜBİTAK in our country in the 1990s also confirms that the years 536-550 were much colder than normal.
But the difficult days for humanity were not over yet…
People who were deprived of sunlight and whose immune systems were weakened were struck by an epidemic for which there was no medicine or cure. The plague epidemic, which began spreading near the Nile River in ancient Egypt, spread to surrounding countries via rats carrying fleas on merchant ships.
This virus, which was first recorded in today's Istanbul, has plunged humanity into incredible chaos in the Mediterranean coastal countries, Europe, Istanbul and the surrounding regions.
The name of this pandemic, which resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred million people according to estimates, was the Justinian virus. Modern historians name this plague after Justinian I, the Byzantine Emperor during the first epidemic. However, Emperor Justinian, although he caught the disease, survived and managed to survive.
In research conducted by the journal Nature in 2013 , the oldest traces of the Justinian virus were found in the Tian Shan Mountains, a mountain range on the borders of present-day Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China, suggesting that the origin of the Justinian Plague was again in the region or nearby.
The Justinian virus, which began to spread in the 540s, continued its effects for about 200 years. The number of people who lost their lives was so much more than the population at the time that people did not know what to do with so many dead and threw many of them into the sea. The people who managed to live at that time called this chain of disasters "tabulatum viros luda" (the layer of doomsday) and carved their experiences into stone.
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