A Day in Fes

Thursday, March 12

Our first stop of interest early this morning was the Jewish quarter, beginning with the Jewish cemetery. We listened to a long history of the Jews in Morocco, about how honoured they were by rulers, as evidenced by the proximity of the quarters (and the cemetery) to the royal palace. The Jewish population of Morocco before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was estimated to be between 250,000 and 350,000. That population decreased to the current level of some 2,250 people, due to emmigration to Israel. We have heard from at least three of our local guides about the inclusion of Jews, the love and respect for Jews, the honouring of Jews, and how they were an important part of the fabric of Moroccan society. So my question is: why did they leave in such mass numbers? Our local Fes guide, when asked how many Jewish people lived in the Jewish quarter of Fes, said, "There are no Jewish people here anymore." So this street is a museum? We walked the length of it, with its protruding wooden balconies gleaming above the Muslim shops below. 

 

The Jewish cemetery of Fes. We weren't allowed to go in.

 

The Jewish Quarter. Very quiet because it's quite early in the morning.

Next we were in the van to go to a ceramics co-op. There we saw a number of master craftsmen making pots, painting dishes, and placing mosaic tiles into frames that would become tables. The work these people do is, well, masterful. One man painted fine lines in a repeating pattern, using a horse-tail brush with maybe three strands of hair in it. Another man made a tagine pot, base and lid fitted perfectly, in minutes as we watched. Men were seated on the concrete floor tapping tiny ceramic tiles into complex patterns that they couldn’t actually see, because the colours are face down as they work. There were women, too, but they had not yet worked enough years to be considered masters.

Master potter. Notice the pile of discards by his left elbow.

Master decorator, making absolutely precise brushstrokes despite our gawking

Samples of the designs, not yet fired

After many years of practice, she will be considered a master

Turning the big stuff. Prefers foot power to electricity.

Placing ceramic tile to make a table

Part of a finished table top

At the end, we got a sales pitch, just as we got a sales pitch in Meknes at a cloth shop that was on the tour. I thought we might be insulated from this, being on a tour, but no. We got the whole spiel about how to save on shipping costs when we have a fountain shipped to our homes. Bettyanne and I discussed the practicality of replacing our wood stoves with fountains, but decided maybe in our next homes there would be a place for such a thing. There’s some beautiful stuff, but egads.

We then drove up to a small fortress on the top of a hill looking over the city, to get a panoramic view of the medina before venturing in. We were there with a zillion tour buses, not really knowing the point of it. Couldn’t really tell what was what from up there. So.

Then we finally got to go into the medina itself. I have memories of two things in Fes. One was the entry through a big gate and the subsequent slightly winding medina road down a long slope. The other was being invited by a man who’d studied in the US to have lunch at his mother’s home. Her house was down one of some thousands of dead ends, a lane so narrow we could barely squeeze through. We went through some lanes like that today, and they brought back the claustrophobic feeling I’d forgotten having back then. Her house, I now know, was a very modest riad with a central courtyard. We ate in one alcove off the courtyard, sitting on floor cushions around a low table. Lunch was served on a single platter, and we all ate from it using our bread to scoop up the stew. But that was 1972.

(I know I took a bunch of photos of dark alleys, but they've disappeared.)

I didn’t recognize the streets of the medina today, but it didn’t feel unfamiliar. The streets, if you can call them that, are narrow and dim. If there’s a tourist section, we didn’t see it, walking, rather, through the food section, the wool dyers’ section, the metal workers section, the clothing section. Most of the latter was jellabas and caftans, oh, and running shoes. 

Knife sharpener in the metals section of the medina

A highlight of Fes medina is the famous tannery. That’s another thing I remember from 1972. The surprise of it, the stench. This time, our access was through a place that sold leather goods, high above the tanning pots. We were handed mint to hold to our noses to tame the stink. None of it seemed as extreme as it did back in the day; even the smell wasn’t so very strong, not to me or to Bettyanne, whose farm experience has hardened her to these things. It could be that it was morning this time, and the weather is cool, whereas last visit was in June or July, and certainly the vats would have been smellier.

Dye pots, Fes tannery

We went for lunch in the medina, and ate a mediocre meal whose best part was the appetizers. These are the same for every meal we’ve had: eight or ten little plates of various vegetables: cubes of beets, marinated carrots, beans, rice, eggplant, peppers (shakshuka), cauliflower, potatoes, and olives, always olives. Coming up was a tour of a wood factory and a silk factory, and we decided together that we’d had enough of tours, so we asked as a group to just go back to the hotel to hang out. That was no problem; the guides got off early, and we got to rest.

Dinner out was another special evening, this time with musicians, belly dancers, and a magician. We were really pleased to see a mature belly dancer with a realistic body: back fat, loose belly folds. She was a good dancer and obviously loved doing it. Belly dancing, incidentally, is not traditional in Morocco, but brings in the tourists — the place was big, and it was packed.

 

 

I do have an update on our spiffy Fes digs. Seems not all rooms are created equal, and one of our members had a room that may have been quarters for staff overflow, I don’t know. She had a full-sized dining table alongside her bed, and a separate room with mattresses on the floor, if I heard correctly. Her heat didn’t work; in fact, hardly anything worked. She had a little window facing outside the riad where she saw a man relieve himself in full view and in more ways than one. Well. We are Wild Women on a Wild Women tour. We can take it! 

 

 

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