In the sixth century, a series of natural disasters struck the Eastern Roman Empire, the most serious of which was the plague that raged from 541 to 542. The contemporary consensus is that Justinian's reign brought a fundamental cultural transformation and, according to Misha Meier's (2016) research, the plague marked a significant caesura in the transition from late antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages. The article is based on the assumption that the catastrophic events were a trigger for the transformation of the therapeutic piety, the development of which was conditioned by the ability to project the unreal. The purpose of the paper was to analyse counterfactual projections in rituals created as a response to the disasters besetting in the age of the Emperor Justinian. The author proposes to treat these religious formulas as visualised forms of counterfactual thinking based on the integration of cause and effect, according to the theory of conceptual blending. The article concludes that in case of the 6th century, counterfactual thinking enabled the transformation and development of early mediaeval culture and may have reduced the stress associated with the catastrophic events that affected the society of the Byzantine Empire.

The thermal, anemometric and bioclimatic conditions on the topoclimatic scale were investigated in the summer season in the EbbaValley region in central Spitsbergen. Eight measurement sites, representing different ecosystems and different types of active surfaces typical of Spitsbergen, were chosen and automatic, hourly recorded, measurements were per− formed at the sites between 11 and 25 of July 2009. The analysis of the spatial distribution of the air temperature and thewind−chill temperature, both for the dayswith radiation and non−ra− diation weather, indicates that the most favorable regions in the interior of Spitsbergen are those situated in the shielded central parts of the valleys and in the lower parts of the slopes with southern exposure. The thermal and wind conditions are definitely less favorable at the tops of elevations and on the glacier. Large differences between the air temperature and the wind−chill temperature were noted, particularly during the unfavorable non−radiation weather, on the glacier and on open peaks due to a large horizontal and vertical wind−chill temperature gradient. The thermal inversions observed in the Ebba Valley in July 2009 were not of the typi− cal, glacier katabatic wind origin. They appeared during the western air circulation, which brings advection of cooled air from above the cold waters of Petunia Bay. The cold air pene− trates into the valley and pushes upwards themass of warmer air in the valley, creating a rather thin inversion layer, whose upper edge is marked with thin Stratus clouds.