You can take your pick from quirk of fate or outrageous good fortune, but it’s generally one or the other to which people ascribe the events which saw custody of the world’s biggest arts festival handed to Edinburgh.

After all, wasn’t founder and inaugural director Rudolf Bing a Vienna-born impresario who worked initially in Berlin and spent most of his career in New York? Yes. Eight decades on, couldn’t we just as easily be talking about a world renowned August arts festival taking place in [insert city name here – an English one, more likely than not]. Yes again.

The same view also has it that in 1947, the year of the first Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), the city was a cold and forbidding place of twitching net curtains and Calvinistic morals, where you’d struggle to find a pint on a Sunday. Hardly the obvious destination for the world’s top performers, then, especially given art’s predilection for late nights and pushing at boundaries of the moral sort.

There’s a little truth to most of that, and a lot of truth to some of it. But even in 1947 the festival had a strong Scottish core. Bing may have been centre stage, but he shared it with people such as Edinburgh-born culture maven Henry Harvey Wood, essentially the EIF’s co-founder.

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With Black Isle-born John Falconer, a son of the Manse, who became Edinburgh’s energetic Lord Provost in 1944 and pushed hard for the establishment of the festival in the city. Even, if you believe the tales, with Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald Primrose (Eton and Sandhurst), who also went by the title Earl of Rosebery. Born and raised in grand Dalmeny House outside Edinburgh, he owned a nag called Ocean Swell whose winnings from the 1944 Derby helped fill the festival coffers.

So........

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