This is an Arcadian dream of Leigh Ferro’s, drawing copiously on his outrageously learned grasp of Byzantine aristocratic titles and protocols.
While I clearly don’t move in sufficiently imperial circles to have seen, let alone walked on, purple-carpeted streets, I did see and walk on a red-carpeted one outside the Austrian parliament, as illustrated here.
‘Every window and roof-top was a-bristle with citizens and as the great company processed along the purple-carpeted street from the Arcadian to the Amastrian Square…’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 47
