King Arthur is one of the most famous and at the same time the most mysterious heroes of world history. Everyone knows that he ruled Britain at the turn of antiquity and the Middle Ages, founded the chivalric brotherhood of the Round Table, was associated with the sorcerer Merlin, Avalon and the Holy Grail. However, scholars have long refuted all these claims, questioning even Arthur's very existence. There are reasons for this - the sources of the early Middle Ages speak little and indistinctly about him, and the subsequent extensive arthurian is fantastic through and through. Nevertheless, in different countries, attempts to find the true Arthur on the pages of history do not stop. One of these attempts was made by the historian Vadim Erlikhman, who recreated the biography of the legendary monarch on the basis of information scattered on the pages of ancient chronicles, genealogies and novels. Painstaking analysis of facts and versions helps to understand what Arthur was (or could have been) and why "Arturovsky" is sometimes called the entire European civilization.