Fez

Backdating per usual! This post has been cluttering my drafts for quite some time.

Fez was one of the stops in the middle of our travels in Morocco. I was a little under the weather, just getting over my bout of food poisoning and the worst motion sickness of my life (that bus ride through the Rif Mountains did me in). In Fez, we hired a local guide through the riad where we were staying, and it was one of the best things we could have done! I loved seeing Fez through the eyes of a local, and our experience was vastly different from when we were flying solo as tourists; we were treated very differently when we were accompanied by a Moroccan man who spoke Arabic and English and had friends in various shops throughout the medina.

This is the main gateway into the city and the medina. One side is done in blue-glazed tilework, which symbolizes peace, and the other side is green, the color of Islam. I wanted to include a couple photos because the intricacy of the tilework is amazing; if you click on the photo above, you can see more detail. The view below puts it into a wider context of its surroundings.

The architecture throughout Morocco is amazing. I love the ogee arches, intricate tilework and carvings, and brass lanterns.

We were very excited to see the leather tannery in Fez; it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of few remaining leather tanneries where leather is dyed using pigeon droppings. During the tour, we were each given a sprig of mint to hold to our noses to supplant the stink of the vats below. The site was being restored, so the visible areas were much smaller than what we had expected based on photographs, but it was still amazing to see the process. I also loved seeing the construction workers pause from their labors during the call to prayer—they arranged themselves in their rows for prayer with their fluorescent safety vests and all!

The photo below depicts restoration work taking place in another area of the city. The entire medina of Fez is actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so restoration work was being completed throughout the city on behalf of this historic preservation and cultural importance. Our guide pointed out the level of minute detail to which the new areas were being constructed and finished—you can see the comparison below.

One of my favorite things about our time in Fez were the many easily missed cultural tidbits of which our guide made us aware. During our wanderings in the medina (in which we surely would have been lost without our guide!), a young boy passed us carrying a plank of wood with rising dough on it. Our guide explained that in Fez, each family brings their bread to a communal baker in their neighborhood; there is one central oven where all the bread is baked. Each family has a way to distinguish which bread is theirs (whether by the pattern scored on top or seeds sprinkled or some other such method of identification). They drop off their bread in the morning, it is baked and cooled during the day, and they retrieve it from their basket in the evening in time for dinner. This was one of my favorite things that I learned and observed in Morocco, and our time in Fez was filled with such observations. I have a separate post addressing Moroccan textiles which shares another similar anecdote about spinning cactus silk.

If I ever make it back to Morocco, Fez is definitely somewhere I would want to return. We were there for a couple days and barely scratched the surface, but even so, what we did see was fascinating.