Hello everyone!
I hope that you are all safe during these unprecedented times.
My country of Croatia has been struck with multiple earthquakes in the previous months, one tearing up our capital of Zagreb in March, and another one destroying a small town of Petrinja. Both earthquakes have been 5+, the latter being 6.3. We have thousands of people without a home during the pandemic of a virus, not the best times.
I’m curious about earthquakes in the past. Are there any historical findings where we can decidedly suppose a some kind of a superstition arose as a consequence of an earthquake? Are there any findings depicting the view people had of earthquakes? Since I’m a European, I guess my wonderment lies in Europe, however any views wherever could be interesting.
Thank you for your replies.
First of all, I sincerely hope evacuees in your country can live safe in evacuation facilities without worrying much about Covid-19 and other hygiene problems (winter is a very bad timing to have such natural disasters that can damage buildings).
Previously I wrote these brief posts on the pre-modern superstitions on the earthquake, in Old Norse (Viking and Medieval Age Scandinavian) and in Japan respectively: How were earthquakes perceived by ancient cultures?
In addition to these cases, Constantinople/ Istanbul and the Aegean sea region have had relatively frequent cases of natural disasters themselves as well as their records, and we have some religious (liturgical) texts for the religious procession in Byzantine Empire that seemed to the disaster as a God's wrath on (morally) corrupted people, just as as some rulers in ancient China and Japan associated their rule with the natural disaster/ prosperity in the 'correlation'/ disaster theory (Croke 1981).
The reference mentioned: