by Tahir Shah
‘How much is it?’
‘A hundred dirhams.’
‘Why’s it for sale?’
The vender frowned.
‘I’ve no need for it,’ he said.
‘Well, what use is it to me?’
‘Believe, really believe,’ he said, ‘and this ghost will be the keyhole into your dreams.’
There is something about Essaouira, the former Portuguese city clinging to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which touches all who venture there. It’s a hybrid, a meeting point of East and West, one of those rare destinations where you never quite know who you’ll meet. The only certainty is that you will leave it different from when you came.
In atmosphere, Essaouira is quite unlike the imperial cities of Morocco’s interior. It’s magically desolate, almost like a forbidden enclave perched at the end of the world. The buildings are stone: thick grey walls, standing proud to the wind and to the freezing Atlantic waters. They form a stark and alluring canvas for a thousand colours – carpets hanging for sale in the souqs, skeins of wool dripping with dazzling dyes, panniers of glinting red mullet being hauled up from the port.
Spend a few days there, traipsing up and down the ramparts with their weatherworn Portuguese cannons, or down the orderly stone streets laid out by the French, and you forget that the rest of Morocco – or the rest of the world – exists. For me, that’s the extraordinary power of the place, a power that’s lured visitors for centuries.
The Phoenicians moored their ships at Essaouira in the seventh century BC. Five hundred years after them, the Romans arrived under Juba II. They used their base there as a manufactory for Tyrian purple dye, a colour derived from murex sea snails, prized for dyeing the Senatorial robes. Then came the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. They christened the city ‘Mogador’ and, after them, Essaouria became a haven for pirates, who plied the Atlantic waters raiding European ships. The medina was laid out in about 1760, by French engineers, on the orders of the Alaouite Sultan Mohammed III. Having glimpsed the natural strategic position, he built a naval base there, and one devoted to trade.
I myself was first drawn to Essaouira by the scent of the wood. The narrow lanes of the lime-washed media are packed with tiny workshops, carpenters busy in the shadows of each. They are master craftsmen, moualems, creating marquetry boxes, carved from the aromatic thuya tree, whose gnarled roots are harvested from the surrounding region. I first smelled the fragrance when taken there as an infant. Essaouira was a destination then on the hippy trail: VW combos, tie-dye and the fresh memory of Jimi Hendrix, who’d just swaggered out of town. Smell those roots, get their aroma deep into your chest, and they lure you back like the scent of lotus flowers on the wind.
The baby-boom hippies may be gone now, but you can still feel their presence. I am never sure whether they came to Essaouira because of the community’s free-thinking attitudes, or if they actually changed the place.
Go down to the beach and you’ll find surfers aplenty, some of them the children of hippies who were here a generation ago. They come from all over the world to do battle with the ferocious winter waves. And in the narrow streets of the old city, tie-dye, dreadlocks, and illicit tobaccos are also in plentiful supply.
As the severe winter chill melts into spring, Essaouira’s atmosphere transforms like a chameleon. The skies turn indigo blue, daubed with wisps of cirrus, the sharp light radiant against white-washed walls. And as spring slips into summer, the city is charged with electric anticipation at the annual Gnaoua Festival, held each June.
An ancient mystical fraternity with their roots sunk deep in African lore, the Gnaoua conjure music that’s a powerful blend of African and Arab, a bridge between this and the spirit world.
Sit at one of the medina cafés and from a distance you hear the distinctive clatter of qarkabeb, the oversized iron castanets, symbol of the Gnaoua. As they come closer, their rhythm shaking the soul, they have the power to send locals and foreigners into trance.
On the night I was offered a cut-price ghost, a group of four Gnaouas swept into the café in which we were sitting. The clatter of their iron castanets was like an exorcism rite, chasing out the demons.
The man beside me held his fist above his head.
‘They can smell it,’ he said.
‘Smell what?’
‘The ghost, the gnaoua… look at them!’
I turned in time to see one of the troupe collapse to the floor. He began writhing, his eyes rolled back.
‘It’s quite normal,’ said the man, darkly.
‘Are you sure?’
The ghost-seller nodded.
‘I speak the truth,’ he said. ‘I swear it, on all I hold sacred.’
SIXTEEN
Fès
LYING BEHIND A PLAIN STEEL DOOR on a dusty lane in Fès, stands one of the most unexpected treasures of North Africa – the Glaoui Palace.
To cross the threshold is to enter a medieval Twilight Zone, one touched by the fantasy of the Arabian Nights. It’s a place where straightforward questions posed by the Western mind go unanswered, and where visitors find themselves changed by the experience. A vast sprawling labyrinth of interlocking courtyards, the Glaoui is a jewel of the faded grandeur at Morocco’s secret heart.
Perched on a broken chair in the shade of an immense galleried courtyard, is Abdou, the guardian. He’s cloaked in a voluminous sky blue Tuareg desert robe, and is drowsy, having just stirred from a midmorning siesta. He smiles, his lips framing a clutch of infirm teeth, as he struggles to stand.
Abdou has lived at the Glaoui for as long as he can remember. If you ask him whether he was born there, or if he actually owns the palace, he looks away, stares across the heat haze, and widens his eyes. He gives the same response when you ask him what its future might bring, or why the courtyard is filled with ducks and geese. After visiting Abdou, as I have done over the years, I’ve come to learn that the best way to appreciate his home is to forget the questions that an Occidental education teaches us to ask, and to listen to the pearls of wisdom that tumble from his lips.
‘Fès is the heart of this kingdom,’ he says in a voice moulded by a fondness for Turkish tobacco, ‘and this is one of the hearts of Fès. It’s a place of secrets, of mystery, a home that has known love and betrayal, poverty and wealth.’
A single drop of perspiration wells up on Abdou’s brow and rolls down his dark cheek, evaporating before reaching his chin. The afternoon is swelteringly hot – the high thirties. The geese and ducks are flapping about because their basin of filthy water has dried up, turned into sludge. Abdou doesn’t seem to care. He lurches forwards in slow motion and leads the way down a dark, dank corridor running off the central courtyard.
A moment later we find ourselves in a kitchen that’s like something out of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court. A colossal chimney stands at the far side of the room. Beneath it there’s a clutter of cauldrons, ladles the size of spades, battered old kettles, and a mountain range of empty tin cans. Abdou flicks his fingers towards the inch-thick dust as if to excuse his disapproval for housework.
‘Come this way,’ he says in a whisper.
Another twist to the right and one to the left, and we’re in another courtyard. Smaller than the first, the walls are ornamented in zelij, mosaics in white and black. Above the mosaics, and the towering colonnades, there’s an upper terrace adorned fabulously with painted wood, all of it about to collapse from rot.
‘This is the harem,’ says Abdou dreamily. ‘Beautiful ladies guarded by eunuchs. Close your eyes, breathe in deep, and you can smell them!’
A little imagination goes a long way in Fès.
Do as Abdou suggests – close your eyes, take a deep breath – and you find yourself catapulted back through centuries. There’s the clatter of mules clip-clopping up the narrow alleyways, the scent of lamb roasting on spits, and the muffled sounds of bustle from the souq.
Fès is without doubt the greatest medieval Arab city still intact anywhere. To wander its streets is to be
part of a way of life that has become fragmented or has disappeared entirely elsewhere across the East. Describing it to someone who’s not been there, is like trying to describe a computer circuit to a blind man. However hard you try, you just don’t know where to start.
One of my earliest memories is of arriving at the great city walls of Fès at dusk. I was only five or six, but I can vividly remember it. We had driven from London, and on reaching Fès it felt as if we had arrived at a citadel poised at the very end of the world. We spotted a group of old men huddled in their jelabas near the great Boujloud gate.
I asked my mother who they were.
‘They’re gamblers,’ she snapped disapprovingly.
‘They are not,’ my father corrected, ‘they are part of an ancient tradition that stretches back a thousand years. They are the storytellers,’ he said.
That first journey was like stepping through an aperture into a magical realm, where the senses came to life, touched by a frenzy of cultural colour. The vibrant sights, intoxicating sounds, delicious tastes and smells changed me, right deep down.
Everyone who journeys to Fès is affected in a similar way. Whereas Marrakech has become a Disneyland version of the Arabian Nights, Fès is the real thing.
Some visitors find it uncomfortable, even a little sinister. And in a way it is. The city is a religious centre, a place that’s content to have tourists but that’s quite nonchalant at the same time. You can’t escape the dark heart, or the city’s bewitching soul. It’s everywhere – in the rambling labyrinth of streets, where pack-mules stumble forward, laden with freshly-dyed skins from the tanneries; and in the ancient medrasas, in the palaces, and the simple courtyard homes.
Talaa Kebir, the main thoroughfare that runs downhill from Bab Boujloud, has more life on it than entire cities I have seen. There are a few emporia touting the usual tourist kitsch, but what’s so wonderful is that most of the shops are selling stuff for the locals – rip-off Nike sneakers and blue fluorescent bras, flour sieves and camel heads for boiling into soup, David Beckham football strip, candyfloss, and chicks dyed pink.
And with every step you hear the sound of artisans, hidden in the maze of workshops that back onto the main street. Some of them are carving appliqué designs from sheets of burnished brass, others sculpting cedar-wood, blowing glass, or weaving cloth for jelabas on enormous homemade looms.
Many of the wares on sale in Marrakech and other Moroccan cities are actually made in Fès where, for centuries, craftsmen have passed on secret techniques from father to son. As well as goods for the tourist emporia, most of Morocco’s mosaics and ceramic tiles are made near the city as well. The kilns are on the outskirts of town and are well worth a visit. They are fired with burning olive stones, and stacked by hand by the youngest apprentices, in a system that’s endured since Roman times.
While Europe languished in its Dark Ages, Fès was already a bustling centre of intellect and commerce. Linked to the great cities of the emerging Islamic world through ever-expanding pilgrimage routes, it found itself connected to Seville and Cordoba, to Cairo, Baghdad, Delhi and Samarkand.
The immense Haj caravans which crossed North Africa and Asia formed a kind of medieval Internet, and brought some of the most celebrated scholars of the age to Fès. Among them, men like the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, the scientific polymath Ibn Khaldun, and the Jewish scholar Maimonedes. Their work led to breakthroughs in science and urban planning and directly influenced the city that became their home. It boasted a state of the art sewage system, schools and universities, community hospitals, fountains, and even public water clocks.
Exploring Fès today, it’s quite challenging at times to imagine when the city was at the cutting edge of technology – a time when the mosaic fountains ran with water and were not just used as communal garbage bins, and a time when the delicate wooden shop façades weren’t all rotten, as they often are today. Even for diehard lovers of the city, people like me, there’s a sadness in the medina, a kind of melancholy. The wealthy merchants departed for the new town and for Casablanca decades ago. These days anyone still to be found in the labyrinth has been left behind. Many of them dream the same dream – to sell their homes and shops to rich foreigners, and to buy apartments with all mod cons in the ville nouvelle.
Thankfully, the love affair with Fès touches a great many Moroccans and foreigners as well. It’s something that none of us can really explain. When we meet, we mumble about details of ornaments and fragments of the city’s soul, in conversations that must mystify those who don’t share our obsession.
One man bitten deeply by the Fès bug is the American-born scholar David Amster. He moved to the medina more than a decade ago, and knows the twists and turns of the nine thousand streets as well as any child playing marbles in the shadows of the Karaouiyine Mosque.
Amster is a connoisseur of the kind of detail that tends to go unnoticed by the untrained eye. He has a passion for the handmade nails and hinges that once adorned every Fassi door. He waxes lyrical about the traditional medluk, a lime rendering which allows the ancient buildings to breathe (cement is the curse of renovation as it suffocates the walls); and he speaks of his dream with a glint in his eye – a time when all renovation is done with obsessive care and age-old skill.
Each month, David Amster’s small team of master craftsmen, known as moualems, restore a stretch of neglected street, or a fountain filled with trash. It’s a kind of guerrilla restoration on a micro scale that’s often done at night when everyone else is tucked up in bed. Amster pays for it all himself by renting out to foreigners a small riad he owns.
Even visitors who stay in the medina sometimes complain of how difficult it is to get under the skin of the city. Once you stray off the main streets, the arteries, you can find that the ever-narrowing web of alleyways are dark and even a little imposing. You quickly get the feeling that all kinds of life is going on behind the battered old doors, but as an outsider you can’t peer in to what is a secret world. A good way of getting instant access is to hint that you want to buy a little house, or even a palace, a dream home conjured from the pages of A Thousand and One Nights. The immobiliers, estate agents, are only too happy to take you round as many homes as you want to see.
In my experience, there’s no better way of getting a cross section of medina life – kitchens with grandmothers toiling away at the dishes and the couscous, laundry dripping in the sun, children scampering about on their trikes, families gripped in front of interminable Egyptian soap operas, and caged chickens up on the roof waiting to become lunch.
A few months ago I was shown a palace for sale with magnificent cedar ceilings, painted in fabulous geometric designs. An elderly craftsman lived in its great salon with a dozen white doves and a ferocious-looking cat. He spent his days cutting leather sandals from animal hides, and told me that he’d been born in the corner room eight decades before.
He looked me straight in the eye.
‘Some of my ancestors are buried in the basement,’ he said.
Nearby, I was taken to another a home at Bab Er-rsif, the most historic area of the medina. Its owner showed me the title document, a scroll twenty feet long. He said his family had lived there for many generations, and that the foundations had been laid at least five hundred years ago.
When I sighed loudly, exclaiming that I simply didn’t have the funds to buy it, the owner smiled. It was a wry, toothless smile of an old man with a plan.
‘Do not worry about money,’ he said dreamily, ‘because there is a secret, and I will tell it to you.’
I asked what it was.
‘Under the floor,’ he went on, jabbing a thumb at the exquisite ancient glazed terracotta tiles, ‘there’s a treasure. It’s vast and worth many times the price I am asking for the house.’
I thought for a moment, and then posed the obvious question:
‘If there is indeed a treasure under this floor,’ I said, ‘why have you not dug it up yourself?’
The owner
wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jelaba.
‘Do you have any idea,’ he said slowly, ‘what problems a treasure like that would give to an old man like me?’
In the end I didn’t buy the house, even though the lure of treasure was strong. But plenty of foreigners have bitten the bullet and snapped up houses – treasure or no treasure – most usually as second homes. There’s a small Anglophone community living permanently in the Fès medina. Of them all, the most indefatigable and offbeat is certainly Mike Richardson.
Mike was a maitre d’ at London’s swish Ivy Restaurant, and at the Wolseley on Piccadilly.
‘One day I was at a party and I overheard someone talking about Fès,’ he says. ‘It sounded absolutely glorious. Before I knew it, I’d moved here, bought a little house with my savings, and opened the Café Clock.’
Lodged in a narrow alley opposite the medieval Medrasa Bouinania, ‘The Clock’, as it’s known to all, is spread out over several levels and is immensely popular. Clambering up and down to all the terraces is such a strain on the legs, that Mike hired a waiter with a penchant for mountain-climbing.
In a back room off the staircase, the chef’s assistant is adding a pinch of dried damask rose petals and a handful of secret ingredients to a fresh batch of minced camel meat. After searching his entire culinary career for the perfect hamburger meat, Mike found it in Fès. As he says – ‘Camel meat sits so nicely on the bun.’
Another European to have realized his dream in Morocco’s secret heart, is Fred Sola, a Frenchman who was actually born in Casablanca. A few years ago he bought Riad Laaroussa, a seventeenth century palace, once owned by the Moroccan Minister for War. His intention was at first to have it as a private home.
The colossal property was in a terrible state of repair, and required renovation on a grand scale. It was so big that when it was finally done, Fred felt lonely. So he started inviting people to stay. Today, it’s an exclusive riad hotel with just eight sumptuous suites. There’s a serenity about the place that soothes everyone who steps across its threshold.