Fes, Morocco, Saturday January 3rd

Fes is a large city composed of three separate sections. The oldest section, Fes el Bali, simply evolved at a time when there was no need to consider transport other than mules in the major thoroughfares. This is where our hotel was and where we spent most of our time. It is an enormous maze of narrow streets and lanes, but there are a couple of major pathways, albeit with dog leg turns and options at every corner, so after a couple of forays, we did find our bearings. Every day, including today, we experienced touts trying to lure us into a carpet or craft showroom or to see the tanneries. The touts we met were not aggressive and it is just their job to ensure that people look at the goods so that they might buy them.
We were now ready for the challenge of Fes el Djedid which is Fes the New, although since it started in the 1270s, maybe not all that new. It was built in a hurry to be the seat of government for the Merenids, with taxes from olive presses at Meknes, and for the Mosque, taxes on the Jews and some Christian slave labour. This area has vast palace complexes and the present king has one which crosses the whole area and is guarded at grand gates by many soldiers. He mostly resides in Rabat, the capital.
The idea of building a new city a little away from the population provided a gap between the rulers and the people, suggesting that total loyalty might not always be forthcoming. In addition, at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Jews were forced to leave Fes el Bali and to live in a ghetto known as the Mellah, which lay between Fes el Bali and Fes el Djedid. They had few rights but were under the protection of the sultan, could be taxed heavily and could be politically exploited by the sultan in dealings with his people. When the French decided to move the capital to Rabat, this section of the city lost its purpose and became the red light district.
Our guide book is not so helpful with maps and gives long wordy descriptions that are hard to follow. We didn’t care where we went so we set off out of Fes el Bali and along beside a huge wall. Three boys were walking along, with the youngest, about three years, crying. A man passing by stopped and asked them what the matter was. I could tell by their actions that the middle sized on was explaining that the biggest one had kicked the little one. The man looked at the child’s knee, admonished the older boy, and gave the little one a mandarine to cheer him up.
Keen to try local cuisine, we bought a paper cone of crisps, only to find that even if they are a local speciality, their soggy nature belied their name. The gently falling drizzle on the little stall may have had something to do with this. We came to the huge initial gate, and then chose to follow the majority of people off to the right. The first section was full of shops for daily life, but gradually we were in the residential sections where the buildings were in even worse repair than those in Fes el Bali. Of course the outside does not always give a true picture of the inside of a building, but the children on the street were dirty and everything was pretty seedy and run down. We wandered on, thinking that we were at a different part of the map and the guide book description to where we really were.
At one stage three young boys told us that ‘It is closed, go that way,’ but failed to tell us what was closed. We walked on and they followed us, until an adult told them to leave us alone. Eventually the road we had taken looped around and we were back where we had started and the boys then ‘guided’ us to the palace. They stopped some way from the gates, assuring us that we could go in, and Keith gave them two coins to share between them. They were indignant and wanted more, but since we hadn’t asked them to guide us, and since what we gave them was in line with the guide book suggestions, we just thanked them and walked off. Of course the palace is closed to tourists. At least the man on the gate was able to point to where we were on the map, and we were able to retrace our steps to start again. On the way we saw the ‘helpful’ boys ensnaring some other tourists.
This time we took the gate to the left, and successfully matched our walk with the guide book description. Unlike the shops in the medina of Fes el Bali, here the customers would mostly be locals. There was the most wonderful array of fabric and caftan shops and others that sold to what must be wealthy customers.
For many of the caftans there were hand crafted slippers to match. All the morning it had been raining off and on but now it was raining steadily and our umbrellas were up. At the end of the main road, which was inconveniently wide and modern, which made it impossible to see all the stalls by walking in the middle, there were huge arches marking the entry to the Mellah.
The houses along the main Mellah road looked completely different from the Arab style houses everywhere else. They were narrow and had dark wood decorated balconies and lots of windows facing the street.
They were built much later than the original Mellah, which is an absolute tangle of streets and buildings with the lanes sometimes less than a metre wide. We were looking for the synagogue and found it down a narrow lane, almost by chance, as we were admiring some patisseries and thinking how it would be awkward to eat them in the rain. An old man let us in for a small fee, and gave us a tour of the synagogue, which he said was still in use. It was certainly in perfect condition with a gallery for women up above. We were shown the ancient Torah scrolls which are in a locked cupboard. They looked like heavy wooden curtain rods with fabric wrapped around them, and since they weren’t unrolled, we did not see any writing. They are precious so it would be crazy to be unrolling them for tourists. The guide pointed out each photo of Jewish cemeteries and buildings in other parts of Morocco, waiting for our response. We went upstairs to look at the cemeteries from the terrace, and they stretched for some distance a street or so away. They were closed since it was the Sabbath, as was the museum, so we were a little puzzled as to why we had been able to go in the Synagogue.
We were happy enough with our little tour and immediately saw that there had been signs leading us there from the main road, not that we had noticed them. Now we paused to read the information. A man came over and introduced himself as Jacob, a Jew born in this Mellah, and willing to show us around the area. Keith asked what he would be charging and he replied that he was just a helpful person and he only wanted a smile. He added that he used to be a policeman as we started off. We knew really that this was probably a bit of a con, and that the very friendly demeanour was to suck us in, but we chose to go along and take our chances. The tour was interesting and we were taken along ways we would never have dared to go by ourselves since they were narrow and dark and some looked like they were entries to people’s houses.
They also were very mazelike and had groups of youths in them, all friendly as we passed, but maybe the sight of them would have put us off had we been by ourselves. We saw houses where the upper storey balconies virtually crossed over each cutting out the light, windows with the design of half a Star of David in their decorative frames, a building with the remnants of the blue paint that was once characteristic of buildings here and a fine but dreadfully dilapidated house that once belonged to the Rabbi.
At this point Jacob said that he worked for the Jewish group that raises funds for the restoration of buildings such as the Rabbi’s house, and that people he takes on tours usually give a donation to the restoration fund. What a surprise! Of course we should have used a guide from the official Jewish Information Centre, but we hadn’t and here we were not sure whether to believe this story or not.
The last item on our itinerary was the old synagogue. From the outside there was little to distinguish the building from others, and in the doorway the presence of a young girl mopping the floor of what was obviously a family home did not give any clues either. Jacob assured us that this was the old synagogue and that the Muslim family who lived there now were his friends and that it was fine to go in. It would be 10 dh each. Here began a bizarre but interesting visit in which we were ushered in to sit down in the family room. It did look to me like an ex-synagogue, with a Torah cupboard similar to the one we had seen earlier in a similar position on the wall. There was no information forthcoming from Jacob, who was busy asking the mother to make us mint tea. The eldest son, a pastry chef, was resting on a couch probably having worked in the night, but he too had to put his shoes on and be friendly to us. We sensed that the family was a little surprised to have such visitors but were naturally kind and hospitable people. The sixteen year old son spoke excellent French so we were able to talk with him, and with others using him as an interpreter. Jacob suggested to me in English that we could give this poor family a lot of things, that they should have our address and our phone number and that we could help the eldest with his business and the mother with the costs of her children. He said that he himself helped to buy shoes for them. At no point did the family make any demands, and they were courteous and friendly, and interested to hear where we had come from. It was an awkward moment. I suggested that we take a photo of us together to remember the moment, and that we would send the family the photo if they had an email address. The son we had been talking to most had one, and that seemed to suffice.
Outside Jacob dropped his super friendly act as we asked him to take us back to the main street. He asked for a donation to his restoration fund and I said that we would make one - when we had finished. He asked for money for cigarettes and for coffee for himself – Keith said ‘No’. We were walking along in the rain, with Keith having lent Jacob his umbrella and using the hood of his coat to keep himself dry instead. We had no idea where we were, and in a narrow alley Jacob stopped and asked for a donation again. We said ‘At the main road.’ All these tactics were straight out of the warning section in our guide book, so we were prepared for them. What we were not prepared for was how he turned quite nasty, and when Keith made an extremely generous donation to a probably bogus restoration fund, he demanded money from me as well. He demanded money for himself on top of the donation and was intent on keeping our umbrella unless we gave him some. Maybe the umbrella bit was a misunderstanding of Keith’s intent when he lent it, but there was no misunderstanding his mood and manner. Keith, first having taken back his umbrella, said that if there had been a charge for the tour up front, when we asked explicitly what would be the cost, we would have decided on the cost whether to go or not. As it was, we had made a donation to a fund we had not been told about as a cost, so he should be happy. Keith also added people from our culture like to know the costs up front. ‘Jacob’ muttered behind us as we walked off.
We were able to forget about Jacob and have a laugh at how we had experienced all the things to avoid – kids, con men and touts – all in one morning. We had had an interesting time and seen things we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, however I would advise against going off with someone like ‘Jacob’ alone.
On our way back to Fes el Bali, we realised that it was too late to have lunch so we decided to have an early tea later. Now began another dive into the Medina, down the other side. The ambiance of the Medina was quite different to that of Fes el Djadid, and seemed welcoming and familiar to us. There is a hum here, the hum of speaking which is low and continuous and quite a contrast to the loud and dramatic spruiking that we are used to in the Victoria Market in Melbourne. Here patience and the polite personal approach are the ways to do business. We strolled along, noting tailors hand sewing braid over seams, coppersmiths tap tapping designs onto the decorative side panels of bellows, artisans chiselling out stone plaques for graves, patient sellers of pyramids of dried fruit and nuts, and of spices that are sculptured so that they don’t look dug into, and butcheries with attendant cats nibbling at piles of bones. The brilliant colours of carpets, scarves, spices, jewellery and the lovely caftans worn nonchalantly for every day wear by shoppers, created a feast for our eyes. At set times the sound of the call for prayer resonated across the whole city. A sudden clip clopping and call to be careful preceded the horses and donkeys which were driven fully laden through the streets, as people stepped smartly to the side. A poor lame donkey had a hard time making it up a steep slope with three men assisting and forcing it on. Smells changed every few steps with some so wonderful you wanted more and others so bad you hurried on. It had said in our guide book that Fes el Bali gave the chance to experience life as near to what it would have been like in the Middle Ages, and certainly it things had not changed much. The sight of a donkey pulling a small cart being used to transport a large television put an end to such romantic thoughts. Of course modern life is all around us, but it is a wonderful thing to be able to see traditional crafts being made not just for museums, traditional clothes being worn because they are so sensible and well adapted to the climate, traditional materials being used which are the ones to be found locally, and food from the area around being sold.
We were very early to eat, and so we were the sole diners in the only restaurant on our square that we had not tried. The waiter, Mohamed, was a delightful man. The Moroccan salad here was not just a delicious jumble of chopped ingredients. It had a pyramid of tomato and onion in the middle surrounded by quarters of potato, zucchini, eggplant mix and carrots, all carefully prepared and spiced. When he heard that a friend of mine was hoping that I would learn how to cook Moroccan style, he told me the secrets of the salad and offered to send me some recipes by email. He told us that the lady who does the cooking has thirty years of experience and we were able to see her and indicate our appreciation – something that can’t happen if there are lots of customers. It was relaxing and a lovely end to the day. It is important to remember to stack up the many kind greetings, friendly chats and experiences such as this against the few more dramatic bad ones. Our overall experience has been great here in Morocco, and we were very much looking forward to our next step; some couch surfing in Midelt.
This activity, set up in the large square, challenges paying participants to fish for a bottle of soft drink using a pole with a string with a small loop in the end.