Carver's Quest

HISTORICAL NOTES

Although, as Professor Fields rightly points out, there are several Ancient Greek writers with the name of Euphorion, there is no record of any Euphorion of Thrace, nor is there any trace of a work similar to Pausanias’s Ellados Periegesis that could have contained clues to the whereabouts of Macedonian gold. However, Creech and Fields were right to suspect that the hills in central Macedonia did contain a treasure worth discovering. In 1977, the Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos undertook an excavation near the small town of Vergina and unearthed what he claimed was the tomb of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. The exact identity of the tomb’s inhabitant is still the subject of scholarly debate but there is no doubt about the significance of the objects that Andronikos found there, and in other tombs, in what was clearly an important burial site for the ancient Macedonians. Many of the objects, including delicate golden crowns and a beautiful golden larnax, the box used to contain human remains, can be seen in the museum at Vergina.

The monasteries at Meteora, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, provide one of the most extraordinary tourist attractions in Greece, but there is not and, to the best of my knowledge, there never has been one called Agios Andreas. They were visited on a number of occasions in the nineteenth century by English travellers who left accounts of the hair-raising methods employed by the monks to haul their guests up to their lofty retreats. The water-colour painter and writer of nonsense verse Edward Lear visited Meteora and painted some memorable views of the rock formations, although, unlike the characters in my story, he chose not to be winched to the monasteries on their pinnacles.

The Marco Polo Club does not exist outside the pages of my novel but I have imagined it to be somewhere close to the other gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall and to share some of the characteristics of the Travellers’ Club. Poulter’s Court, home to Jinkinson, is an imaginary London address. So, too, are the lane near Holy-well Street containing the brothel in which Adam and Quint find Ada and the Wapping backstreet in which the Cat and Salutation is open for business. With the exception of a few individuals (Sir Richard Burton, W.S. Gilbert, Effie Millais and others) who flit peripherally across its pages, all the characters in Carver’s Quest are my own invention. Any historical errors in the novel are similarly my responsibility.