A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco

by Suzanna Clarke

  He didn’t need to ask twice. Leaving the modern quarter, we passed under the Bab Bou Jeloud – the Blue Gate – and into the Medina, then down innumerable dark alleys populated by cats who blinked at us, or slunk away on our approach. In the moonlight, one alley looked much like another and I was amazed at David’s unerring sense of direction. We finally arrived at a large doorway, and as he ushered us in the first thing I noticed was the strong, fragrant smell of freshly sanded cedarwood.

  We were standing in a dimly lit courtyard with an atrium stretching high above. All around was a wealth of decoration: blue, green and white tilework – or zellij – intricate plaster and wood carving, and two enormous cedar doors. It was like a jewel box, its beauty so overwhelming it was hard to imagine living in such a palace.

  In contrast, the furniture was surprisingly Spartan: a bed, a single chair, nowhere to cook as yet. But who needs possessions and comforts when you wake up every day to such splendour? We had never envisaged anything like this. The prospect of restoring such a house was at once daunting and thrilling.

  A few days later, I farewelled Sandy and the tour party at Casablanca airport. Sandy had to return to Australia for work, but I caught the train back to Fez, with the intention of finding us a house.

  FEZ WAS ONCE the largest city on the planet. Founded in 789, it became the centre of Moroccan scientific and religious learning, a status due to the altruism of a remarkable woman named Fatima al-Fihria. One of a group of refugees who fled religious persecution in Kairouan, Tunisia, in the ninth century, Fatima was from a wealthy merchant family and used her inheritance to start a place of learning. Karaouiyine University was completed in 859 and is the oldest educational institution in the world. Classes in religion are still held at the complex, which also contains a mosque and a library.

  Fatima’s act was even more altruistic than it might appear. Being a woman, she couldn’t actually attend the university herself, but plenty of men did – Muslims and Christians from all over North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In fact Karaouiyine had a major impact on mediaeval Europe. In the tenth century, Arabic numerals, including the concept of zero, were taken back to France by a student who went on to become Pope Sylvester II. He used his newfound understanding to invent a more efficient abacus, the basis of modern computing. Karaouiyine University also rejuvenated and spread the Indian concept of the decimal point, for which accountants are no doubt eternally grateful.

  Modern-day Fez has three distinct sections. The Medina is the oldest and is known as Fez-al-Bali, meaning Old Fez. The second, Fez Jedid, or New Fez, lies uphill from the Medina and dates from 1276. It includes the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter. The third section, the Ville Nouvelle, is the administrative and commercial centre. Having learned from their mistakes in Algeria, the twentieth-century French colonisers resisted bulldozing the Fez Medina in order to modernise because the locals tended to get upset, with nasty consequences. Instead they situated the Ville Nouvelle several kilometres away. With its broad avenues and street cafés, it looks as if it were modelled on Haussmann’s Paris.

  As my school French had not equipped me to do much more than catch a train and order a coffee, and my Darija being limited to ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, I hired a translator, a polite young man named Nabil. He seemed bemused by my desire to live in a city that he and his friends would have left in a flash, if given a work visa in a Western country.

  David had written me a list of houses he considered architecturally significant and which were in our price range. In Fez there are two types of houses, dars and riads. While both are centred around courtyards, a riad is generally much larger, its distinctive feature being a garden, or at least a lemon and an orange tree. Riads are rare in Fez and usually expensive.

  ‘You’re a riad person,’ David told me one day, after I expressed a desire for some light and greenery. The problem was we were on a dar budget.

  As my search proceeded, Nabil’s back, framed by the towering walls that enclose the Medina’s alleyways, became a familiar sight. During the day, the alleys were a constantly changing panoply of passers-by, children playing, salesmen touting, donkeys carrying goods. House doors were often open and old people sat on their steps warming themselves in the sun. At night, though, as I soon discovered, the alleys and their entranceways became a haven for teenagers’ secret rituals of hashish and stolen kisses.

  Following Nabil around, I began to understand that the Medina was a place where helping your neighbours was not an option but a necessity. Once, Nabil paused at a doorway where a veiled girl of about thirteen stood holding a tray of unbaked bread. He asked her a question, she pointed in reply, and without hesitation he took the tray and continued walking.

  ‘Do you know her?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, but anyone who lives in the Medina and is walking past a bakery will take someone’s bread.’

  Neighbourhood bakeries, where families can send not only their bread but biscuits, cakes, even whole legs of lamb or a pizza, are one of the five essential facilities that Fez’s thirty-odd quarters have in common. According to Islamic tradition, the others are a mosque, a school, a communal bathhouse and a fountain.

  ‘How does the baker know whose bread is whose?’ I asked.

  He looked at me as if I were lacking intelligence. ‘Every family makes their bread slightly differently, and the baker will have been baking it for many years, so he just knows.’

  Coming from a country where the staples of life are mass-produced, I found this unaccountably wonderful. ‘He just knows,’ I muttered under my breath as we continued on.

  Although at first the Medina seemed a confusing maze, I soon discovered that it is laid out in an organic and logical fashion. Like blood vessels leading into veins, small alleys where people live join streets with tiny shops that sell everyday necessities. In turn, these streets lead to main roads where the souks, or markets, are, and these roads eventually connect with the city’s two major arteries – Tala’a Kbira (the big rise) and Tala’a Sghira (the small rise).

  Running beneath all these streets and alleys is a complex network of water channels which supply households, public fountains, and industries such as the tanneries. Part of the construction of this ingenious water system, which dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, involved dividing the Oued Fez, the river that runs through the Medina, into two branches – one supplying clean water and the other carrying away effluent. But by the 1960s the system was faltering: the flow of the Oued Fez was reduced because of building in the catchment area to house rural refugees, driven to the city by a drought lasting more than a decade. A dam was built, and nowadays many of Fez’s public fountains no longer flow as they once did.

  Fez was not built to a master plan, but instead reflects the Islamic principle of social order, with individual expression subsumed into a harmonious whole. For this reason it is regarded as the model Muslim city. Its streets are not merely visually stimulating, but give the other senses a workout as well. The spicy scent of tagines wafts out of kitchen windows, mingling with the yeasty aroma of bread and cakes from communal ovens. There’s the heady fragrance of fresh cedar being shaped into a door, a window frame or a piece of furniture. Less attractive is the acrid stench of glues and solvents. Donkey dung litters the wider alleys, and I soon learned to watch my step. Just as quickly I became inured to the reek of cat and human pee.

  Being a female turned out to be an unexpected advantage in my house search. Usually only women are at home during the daytime, and they’re generally reluctant to admit a strange male to the house. But when they saw me they would visibly relax, and we were always invited inside. In the space of a few days I saw so many houses that they began to meld into each another, and it was difficult to remember which kitchen or terrace went with which house. To overcome this, I took photos and notes and went over them at the end of the day.

  David had given me some tips for determining the age of a house. He told me that those with masharabbia �
�� intricate wooden mesh screens on upstairs balconies and on upper windows facing the courtyard – were built before the late nineteenth century. Under Islam as practised then, the faces of women could not be seen by men outside their own families. This meant that when strangers came to the house the women would retreat to sit behind these screens, where they could see what was going on in the courtyard while remaining hidden from view. As attitudes became more relaxed during the nineteenth century, masharabbia began to be replaced with less expensive wrought iron.

  With other information David gave me, I was soon able to estimate the age of a house from the height at which tiles stopped on the walls, and from the colours and decorations used. But it wasn’t always straightforward, as plasterwork and zellij were usually renewed every hundred years or so. A house could be much older than it appeared on the surface.

  I saw some once magnificent but now forlorn houses that were crying out for restoration, deserted by wealthy families who’d left for Rabat when the French protectorate made that city the capital instead of Fez. Now these huge crumbling edifices were full to bursting with squatters, drought refugees from the countryside. Where one family might previously have lived, now there were five or six. Having had no maintenance for decades, their once grand rooms had an air of neglect and quiet desperation.

  ‘What happens to the people here if the house is sold?’ I asked the agent as I inspected one particularly glorious but decaying example, the one-time residence of a Sufi saint. Every room was occupied by a different family, and the outstanding woodwork was cracking with age and exposure to the weather.

  The estate agent had also been recommended to me by David. Larbi was a small, grey-haired man who refrained from the incessant sales patter his Australian counterparts engaged in. Maybe this was because he spoke not one word of English.

  ‘They are paid to move as part of the deal,’ he told me via Nabil.

  That made me feel less guilty, but we couldn’t afford to do the amount of work required to save the Sufi’s riad, even if we’d been able to scrape together the asking price. I just hoped someone with the money and the know-how would come along soon.

  Some houses I saw were too far gone to consider, their structural problems severe enough to overwhelm even the most ardent restorer. There were fissures in walls and undulations in floors that spoke of subsidence over the centuries, poor foundations, and other, unknown forces at work in the earth beneath.

  My aim was to find a house that had been spared the process of modernisation. In poor communities, the challenges of the present often take precedence over saving the past, and the Fez Medina is no exception. When Moroccans come into money, most want what people the world over desire – modern amenities. Things that look shiny and new, just like on television. This can spell disaster for an ancient house.

  David had taken me to one riad where the traditional zellij had been covered over with shiny grey Chinese bathroom tiles. The walls had been painted an institutional green, and the wall fountain, which would have once been beautiful, had been ripped out and replaced with a laminated hand basin illuminated by a fluorescent light. The combination of the décor and high walls made me feel like I’d been transported to an episode of Porridge, the British television comedy about life in prison.

  Another riad David showed me was important enough and old enough to be listed on a register of significant buildings. Inside, the first thing that struck me was the smell – an overwhelming odour of stale urine. I had to ignore the objections of my nose as David excitedly pointed out the exquisite wooden carving around the atrium, and the fine zellij work on the wall fountain. It was obvious that at one time this house had been really cared for.

  The riad had two large salons facing one another across a courtyard, and a sitting niche on another side that had been enclosed. Beside the fountain, stairs led to a massreiya – a highly decorated apartment usually reserved for the eldest son or male visitors. Up in this massreiya, a woman was nursing a baby while a pot of chickpeas bubbled on a gas burner beside her. She smiled at us, unconcerned by our intrusion.

  The riad’s small appearance was deceptive, belying the rabbit warren of rooms we discovered. In two of the larger rooms, ancient and beautiful tile work was covered with manure. Evidently these were the farm rooms, and I felt a pang of sympathy for the animals forced to live there.

  Up on the terrace was a studio, and a makeshift and very rustic kitchen. David was in his element, intrigued by the details of how this chimney was constructed and by that painting on the ceiling of the studio. But looking out from the rooftop, we discovered the source of the overpowering stench. The house overlooked one of Fez’s most famous tourist attractions – the thousand-year-old Chouwara tanneries. Essential ingredients in the bleaching of the hides are pigeon poo and goat’s urine. Next to the bleaching pits are dozens of vats filled with blue, red, yellow and brown dyes, in which leather workers spend their days immersed thigh-deep. Colourful and interesting, but hardly an ideal neighbour.

  David tried to convince me to buy the riad. ‘It’s a real gem,’ he enthused.

  There was no doubt it was an extraordinary piece of architecture, but there was the small problem of the smell.

  ‘What you need to find,’ I told him, ‘is a rich person with no olfactory nerves. And preferably a loner, because no one will ever come to visit.’ It wasn’t me.

  Despite the frustrations of house hunting, I loved staying in the Medina. The place was alive with sounds from morning to night. During the day, there were cries of ‘Balak, balak!’ – ‘Take care, take care!’ – as mules and donkeys, laden with produce, trotted through the alleys. Occasionally I would hear the sound of African drumming, amplified by the high walls, and snatches too of Arabic music, and always the shouts and squeals of children playing. Walking at night, I was never far from the sound of water, gurgling below the paving stones or tinkling from some unseen fountain. Sometimes there were high-pitched ululations from far over the rooftops as a wedding celebration continued into the small hours.

  If I woke before dawn I would hear a melodic, lyrical song coming from the nearest mosque. This was to comfort insomniacs and the sick, and was followed by the muezzin’s first call to prayer. The cry, ‘It is better to pray than sleep’ spread from mosque to mosque, consuming the city in a chant that echoed across the rooftops and rang around the courtyards, luring the devout from their beds. It gave the Medina a sense of otherworldliness, of another layer hidden below the surface of everyday life.

  After about a week of looking at several houses a day, I saw two I liked in succession. The first was a larger dar with pristine blue and white zellij. Although the tiles were new, they had been skilfully laid in the old style, and I was not surprised to learn that the house had been the home of a master zellij craftsman. The upper rooms had cedar shutters and window frames that were in excellent condition, but the grand doors of the salons were missing.

  Larbi claimed these could easily be replaced, but I wasn’t so certain. I had seen one set for sale in Marrakesh for the equivalent of fifty thousand Australian dollars. This was more than the price of the house, and two sets were needed. It also occurred to me that replacing them would no doubt entail removing the doors from some other old house, so all we’d be doing was passing the problem on.

  The second house was a riad, centrally located off the main tourist thoroughfare, the Tala’a Sghira, at the end of the narrowest alley I’d ever seen – only slightly wider than my shoulders. I wondered how they managed to get furniture into the house. Through the front door, I followed a long passageway and emerged via another doorway into a small but attractive courtyard with two trees – a straggly loquat and a lemon – and a beautiful wall fountain. Upstairs, above the ground-floor salon, was an enormous room the size of a European apartment, with stained-glass windows and reasonable zellij. There were several other small rooms on the same level, and from the roof a view over the Medina. Not a spectacular view, but taken as a whole th
e property was the best I had seen, and it was in our price bracket. It didn’t scream to me, ‘I’m the one, buy me,’ but my week was up and it was either this house or wait another year.

  Back in Brisbane, I showed Sandy the photographs and described the riad. He was much more enthusiastic than I, but maybe I was housed-out. We decided to go ahead and buy it, but there was one major problem – the vendors spoke only Darija. As Australia wasn’t exactly flush with Darija-speakers, it was necessary to get someone in Morocco to place our offer, and the most obvious choice was David. I was reluctant to impose further on his goodwill, since he’d been so generous with his help already and had an extremely busy job, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative. I emailed to ask if he would act as our agent, with us paying him for his services. He said yes, but did not wish to charge anything.

  Over the next several months, as negotiations became increasingly complex, I wondered if David ever regretted his generosity. There was a bit of argy-bargy about the price, but as usual both sides compromised and we ended up somewhere in the middle. There was an engineer’s report to organise, and paying the deposit turned into a major drama when the money disappeared between banks, only to turn up weeks later, just as we were getting desperate. No doubt a bank employee somewhere had been making the most of the currency markets.

  In preparation for life in Morocco, Sandy and I took up French lessons with a young Belgian living in Brisbane, who obligingly doubled as a translator when we needed to ring the notary in Fez. With a growing sense of excitement we arranged for settlement the following January, when we planned to return. That was eight months away, but seemed more than adequate even for the most convoluted of bureaucracies.

  But as the months dragged on, it turned out that the vendor was missing a vital piece of documentation – the signed transfer from the previous owner – without which he was legally unable to sell the riad. Since that owner was now dead, the vendor was going to try to get the man’s numerous relatives to sign a new version of the document, and he claimed everything would be sorted out by the time we arrived, inshallah.