* The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (near Selçuk in what is now Turkey), some 180 miles northwest of Myra (modern Demre), was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This Artemis (Diana to the Romans) was little like the Artemis of the ancient Greeks. She was a throwback to something much older and darker: Artemis and other Roman religious figures had been layered onto her, yet her statues still savoured more of Egypt than of Greece. Her Spring festival brought thousands to the city for weeks of processions, sports, ceremonies and matchmaking, and all year round her temple brought profit and employment. Nicholas was not the first Christian to be a thorn in their flesh: see Acts 19:23-41, where Luke describes how Paul’s preaching hit the town’s brisk trade in Artemis-themed silver charms. The Temple at Ephesus was still open in the time of St Nicholas, though it was closed down early in the fifth century. Soon almost nothing of it remained.

* The date of 343 is the traditional one. The contemporary lists of bishops attending the Council of Nicaea in 325 do not wholly tally with one another, but some include Nicholas, bishop of Myra.

* Some archaeologists today believe that the first resting place of St Nicholas was not in Myra itself (Michael says only that he was buried “in the church of that district”) but further west, on an island some seventy miles round the southern coast of what is now Turkey, and about twenty miles from his birthplace in Patara. The island was for a long time called St Nicholas Island, though it is known today as Gemiler Adası. According to this theory, Nicholas was moved back to a monastery in Myra by about 650 as Arab raids became more serious. On the same convenient grounds, St Nicholas’s remains, or at any rate most of them, were then snatched from the protesting monks by the Church of Rome in 1087, and taken to Bari in Italy, while the authorities in Constantinople were still reeling from defeat by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. In 1100, the four monks who still kept the shrine watched on helplessly as Venetian crusaders plundered what remained. We may be grateful they did not suffer the fate of The Holy Table of St Sophia.

* Michael asserted that the ‘woman’ was “a wicked and mischievous demon, who had formerly dwelt in the temple of Artemis, but who had been chased out of it together with his companions by our holy and wonder-working father Nicholas”.