You start in bumper-to-bumper London, with the cheery voice on the satnav deciding not only to take you into the Congestion Zone (at an extra charge of £30), but also for some reason giving you a tour of all the sights (and traffic nightmares) of the West End, including Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus.
Finally, after travelling less than 30 miles in about 3 hours, you manage just in time to enter onto a motorway, and arrive at Stansted Airport with only half an hour to spare. As you run to the terminal from the car park the wind is strong and freezing cold. The gales seem determined to turn to rain in what is a typically overcast English October afternoon.
But fear not. In less time than it takes to watch an in-flight movie (even though on ultra-low budget Ryan Air there most certainly is no such thing), you’ll find yourself being deposited by a taxi in front of a massive 12th century gate plastered gleaming white.
At the top is an arch that is rounded and far wider than the narrow rectangular entrance below. You gaze further up and the arch finishes in a long, thin point. Then you look down again. On the other side of the gate is a completely different world.
Everything is a shade of brown – the walls that turn in on you, narrowing at times to slightly more than one person wide; the old and somewhat untrustworthy wooden beams that seem to be holding up large blocks of stone; and the pathway, a mixture of crumbled plaster pulverised under thousands of passing feet, together with bricks and paving stones often torn up to make way for some much needed water-main repairs.
It’s almost dark, and you need to watch carefully where you place every step, since the lighting in the passageway is both minimal and hit-and-miss. But you need to raise your head as well, because every 10 metres or so you come upon somebody in the semi-darkness.
There’s an older man, with five days of grey stubble, wearing a white and blue pinstriped pyjama-like garment that goes all the way down to his slipper-clad feet. On his head is a piece of black cotton material that’s wrapped around in an expert twist.
Next comes someone dressed top to toe in a shiny black gown. The head is bowed, trying to find a safe way through. But then the person looks up, having seen your feet, and you’re absolutely startled.
The only uncovered area is right around the top of the face, and you’re caught in the stare of the most expressive, dark and liner-enhanced eyes you’ve ever seen.
You’re just re-gaining your breath, and trying to get your brain to tell your eyes to start focussing again, when you hear a “clip-clop” sound, first muffled, then suddenly much clearer.
You can’t see anything ahead, so you take a few more steps. But as you do, out from a side passage you didn’t even realise was there pops the head of what looks remarkably like a horse.
There’s a human-generated hissing noise, and what could possibly be a slap, and you watch as the animal head pulls behind it a great load of hay, so big in fact that it’s touching the walls on both sides of the passage. At the last moment you jump into a doorway, flattening yourself against a wooden door that looks as if it was built in biblical times.
You glance down as the animal (a mule) and his prodding master pass by. You see something fresh and “vegetative” on the pavement and you realise just what else often falls to the ground adding to the brown colour everywhere.
Welcome to Fes. Welcome to the edge of the mysterious and confounding continent of Africa. And welcome to the great Arabic culture, together with its means of coming to terms with human existence – Islam. Welcome! You are very welcome! Welcome to Morocco, my friend!
ooOOoo
Most visitors to Morocco probably don’t make Fes their first port of call. For one thing it’s not on the coast, like Tangier or Casablanca, and moreover it doesn’t quite have the 1960s caché of a place like Marrakesh.
No, Fes appears to be first and foremost a city for Moroccans. They describe it themselves as the “Mecca of Morocco” or the “Athens of North Africa”, and it’s a place of both long-established culture and learning, and strong religious roots. It also happens to have what is arguably the largest car-free city centre in the world, the magnificent (and totally confusing) medina (or “old city”).
Fes was established in 789AD by the founder of Morocco, Moulay Idris I. Moulay Idris was a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed, but fled from Syria in the Mideast, and then travelled all the way across North Africa to the far west.
He married the head of a Berber tribe (the Berbers being the nomadic peoples who have lived in Morocco from time immemorial). This coming together of the Arabic and the Berber produced the dynamic that is still the driving force (and cause of significant problems) in the country today.
The original inhabitants of Fes didn’t waste any time. Within 60 years they had set up a university (founded by a woman), which today is the oldest continuously run institute of higher learning in the world. In addition they built the Kairouyine Mosque, both the oldest and largest in Africa.
Fes was helped considerably in this regard by waves of immigrants, beginning in 817AD with the arrival of a first group of Moors (or more correctly Al-Andalusians) who had been expelled from Cordoba in Spain.
There was always an uneasy relationship between the Arabic Al-Andalusians and the Christians to the north of that country. But the Al-Andalusians nevertheless developed the magnificent Moorish culture in southern Spain, until they were expelled once and for all by the Spanish in 1492.
Al-Andalusians, other Arabs driven out of what would later be known as Libya, and Jews from Spain (the Sephardics) gave Fes a decidedly Arab character in an otherwise nomadic Berber region, and Fes is still regarded in Morocco as both the most traditional and most Arabic place in the country.
ooOOoo
When foreigners (and even Moroccans from other parts) come to Fes, they invariably get lost in the medina. Fes actually has two ancient quarters, but as to where one stops and the other begins, I have no idea. All I know is that it is one of the most confusing, dynamic, crowded and intriguing urban centres I have ever visited.
The residential areas, which seem to be at the periphery, are the ones that have the really narrow passageways. You do find small shops every once in a while, a bit like the medina equivalent of a corner dairy.
But if you need fresh food ingredients, or new clothes, or any of the hundreds of things we take for granted in daily life, you have to walk down into the commercial part (the souk, or market).
And then of course you need to know which turns in the maze of walkways to take, and what area might have what you want. Like ancient trading districts I have visited in Southeast Asia, shops in the souk selling the same types of products tend to congregate nearby each other.
One thing is certain, however. You can find almost anything in the souk, and the spectacle of all the goods in their congested, winding array is one of the great sights to be had anywhere in the world.
There are the date sellers, for instance, with so many varieties of this famous desert fruit, set out in such amazing pyramids, that you simply have to stop and have a dumb-founded look.
That’s all the seller needs, of course, and the banter starts as soon as he catches your eye. If you don’t buy a handful of “very best quality” at the first stand, you still have to negotiate (and that’s definitely the word!) your way through 20 or 30 more just nearby.
Or how about the nougat seller? Nougat is a popular Moroccan treat, and the sweets stalls have it in colourful 2kg blocks, wrapped in cellophane and stacked up against the wall. The merchants also have blocks broken down for “impulse buying”, and even smaller tasting plates obviously designed to lure you in.
There is, however, a cultural conflict. For Moroccans the sight of honey bees visiting the pieces of nougat is a sign of their purity (the Koran has a lot of good things to say about bees). For tourists, on the other hand, the insects (which are jet black in colour) look for all the world like big blowflies, something that can be quite off-putting, to say the least.
In the market you have to also continuously be on the lookout for heavily laden mules, the ever-reliable donkeys, and men with two wheeled carts carrying heavy loads. The souk may be a vibrant commercial centre of a city with a million people, but it most certainly isn’t serviced by delivery trucks or couriers. There doesn’t appear to be a vehicular road in the whole place.
~originally composed in November, 2011~