A Gate to the medina in Fez. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
* “Traversing Fez, as many visitors have noted, is like stepping back in time… a dizzying sensory overload, full of unexpected turns and visions, esp. when we reached the market.” *
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The New York Times, TR1, by Melena Ryzik (Fez, Morocco, October 27, 2013) – We spotted the craftsman first, alone in his workshop, a cubby barely larger than a closet. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such stalls in the medina in Fez, an ancient city within a city of winding paths and centuries-old artisanship, where vendors tout their leather and oils on every corner. But this stall stood out. It was nearly bare, not crammed as most of the others were with doodads to be fussed and negotiated over. A few tools hung on the wall, alongside the red Moroccan flag with its green pentagram, and some old photos of the craftsman, now white-haired and wearing a traditional long robe.
Walking through a narrow pathway in the medina. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
It was early afternoon, and he sat on the cement floor, a few feet above the sidewalk, his wares spread out before him: delicate combs and spoons, in pearlescent cream and black, seemingly crafted out of bone. The combs were in playful animal shapes: cows and fish and rabbits.
Waving me over, their carver made a game out of pretending they were eating out of my hand, a visual joke that worked despite language barriers, especially when punctuated by his broad grin. He knew: silliness translates well.
Suddenly, he rose, stepped out of his shop and shuttered it. My photographer and fellow traveler, Ben Sklar, and I thought that perhaps it was time for midday prayer, or tea, and that our interaction was over. But the man beckoned us to follow him as he walked up the street in his orange djellaba, pausing to talk to a man outside a cafe, who turned to us.
“He wants to invite you to his home for lunch,” he said in English, smiling. And so off we went, trailing after our new host — whose name, we later learned, was Mohammed Saili — as he led us through this labyrinthine place, toward a meal with his family.
It was one of the many instant connections we made during our trip in May, when immersing ourselves in medieval history and scrambled geography, and leapfrogging cultural obstacles, proved smoother than we’d imagined.
Traversing Fez, as many visitors have noted, is like stepping back in time.
Laid out in the ninth century on the Fez River, the 540-acre medina, Fez El-Bali, was a scholarly and commercial center of North African and Muslim life, and claims to be the home of the oldest university in the world, University of Al-Karaouine, founded in 859.
Socially and architecturally, the city reached its heyday in the 13th and 14th centuries; the expansion known as the “new town,” Fez Jdid, dates to this period.
Once the capital of Morocco, Fez remains a cultural and spiritual locus; the medina, named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981, is said to be one of the largest car-free urban zones in the world.
To help us navigate this bustling walled mecca, tour books and friends who had been there uniformly suggested that we hire a guide. And, indeed, from the moment we’d parked our car in a dusty lot just outside one of the medina’s gates, there were young men and teenage boys offering, in good English, to show us around for a negotiable fee.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with employing a little local assistance. But Ben and I were used to doing things on our own, and preferred self-guided adventure. And as we discovered on our four-day trip, exploring Fez independently — trusting in native Fassi hospitality and our own instincts, along with an assist from contemporary technology — is not only possible, it’s also vastly rewarding.
Which doesn’t mean we didn’t get lost. “There is a good deal of frustration involved in the process of enjoying Fez,” Paul Bowles wrote in an essay on the medina, part of Morocco’s third-largest city. Not everyone would like it, he added. “The street goes down and down, always unpaved, nearly always hidden from the sky.
Sometimes it is so narrow as to permit only one-way foot traffic; here the beasts of burden scrape their flanks on each side as they squeeze through, and you have to back up or step quickly into a doorway while they pass, the drivers intoning, ‘Balak, balak, balak …’” (“Watch out, watch out watch out!”)
Bowles, the expatriate New Yorker who introduced the charm and mystique of Morocco to many Western audiences, wrote this in 1984, and not much has changed since. Though occasionally a motorbike roars through, the majority of traffic is pedestrian — or feline; stray cats are everywhere.
Donkeys still trudge through, laden with goods, serving as taxis and deliverymen. On the outskirts of town, you can witness transportation history reversing itself, as trucks are unloaded onto pack animals.
The UNESCO designation means that the architecture of Fez is meant to be preserved. The twisting cobblestone paths will not be enlarged or smoothed out, the tight jumble of sand-colored madrasas, mosques, bazaars and homes — their colorful tiled courtyards rendered invisible by imposingly thick outer walls — will not be broken by a sleek, modern building. GPS is nearly useless there.
Mohammed Saili, a comb craftsman. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
Medina GPS, the joke goes, comes in the form of boys who follow you or spring up when you appear unsure, offering to lead you around for a few dirhams.
They approached us regularly, but we simply said “La, shukran” — no, thank you — and proceeded. (The novelty of Westerners speaking a bit of Arabic seemed enough for them to move on; French helped, too.)
Our hotels provided hand-drawn maps, and staff and shopkeepers graciously sketched out walking directions. But one wrong turn and we were adrift in a maze of nearly identical alleys, each without street signs or visible outlets.
I might have jotted down notes to help us find our way, but Ben had a better idea: he took iPhone pictures of every turn, intersection or landmark, giving us a visual guide to consult at disorienting moments.
Sometimes we didn’t need to look to find our way. Place Seffarine, a breezy square, was recognizable by its soundtrack: metal clanging on metal.
Under the shade of a three-story tree, a man in a soccer jersey was banging out a copper pot. On the steps surrounding him, others hammered and sculptured, chiseled, polished and buffed. This was a central marketplace for brass and copper cookware, and each finely wrought teapot or three-foot plate produced its own resonating chime as it was hand-finished, a cacophonous public orchestra. A worker taking a nap on a wheelbarrow unconsciously tapped his foot to the rhythm of the square.
“It’s not quite like music,” said the man in the soccer jersey, who said he trained as a chemist before taking up work in Place Seffarine. “But if I don’t hear it, I miss it.”
Smells, too, serve as a signpost. The best way to find the open-air leather tannery, locals told us, is to use your nose. Among the main attractions in Fez, the Chouara and Sidi Moussa tanneries date to the Middle Ages, and the practice of turning hides into supple leather has hardly been updated since. Dozens of workers toil over open vats that contain animal urine and dung, dipping skins in to treat them before hand-dyeing them in bright yellow, red and white, stomping them under the hot sun to distribute the pigment. You can sniff them out from far, far away.
A carpet vendor takes down his displays in the medina. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
Visitors are typically not permitted around the pits, so a robust tourist business has sprung up on terraces overlooking them, and we were regularly bombarded with offers to take us somewhere with an expansive view. Pay a few dirhams for the peek and you receive a sprig of mint to combat the pungent odor.
But we found our own way to get a closer look. In Fez, it’s common to see heaps of fresh leather transported across town, on their way to becoming colorful purses or babouches, the pointy slippers Moroccans are famous for producing.
Determined to see the leather trade in action, one afternoon we followed a man with a dozen hides — either goat, sheep or cow — slung over his shoulder. He crisscrossed the medina and stopped in a dusty inner square where dozens of buyers and sellers picked through the piles, pinching the rough-edged white leather hides in search of the softest. (Stand around long enough and someone will ask you to feel one, vouching for its quality.)
At 3 p.m., the market suddenly got very busy. It was like being on the floor of a stock exchange, with a flurry of animated brokers and money handlers dashing between buyers and sellers, negotiating prices with slips of paper. A few tourists wandered through, but nobody paid them any mind; this was pure local commerce. An orange juice cart materialized. Within an hour the activity had slowed down. The market, which is open daily except Friday and Saturday, has a color-coded system: yellow-dyed leather, for example, is traded separately from white, because it’s more expensive to make.
It was at the market that we met Mohamed El Mounadam, a broker who spoke English and offered to take us inside the tannery. Soon, we were walking through a back entrance of the Sidi Moussa tannery, where a ritual that has lasted centuries was taking place.
Mr. El Mounadam was the first person in his family to work there, he said, as he gingerly led us around the pits, which were laid out in a honeycomb pattern. The stench was more animal than chemical, as older men in chinos and boots sloshed the skins around, submerging themselves up to their waists in the solvents. To the tour groups watching from above, we must have been a surprising sight. How did these foreigners — a woman in a loose head scarf and platform sandals, and a lanky photographer, snapping away — manage to get down there? But the workers took our presence in stride, stopping for introductions and saying what they could in French or English. The boss, rotund, cheerful and curious, came over too.
A colorful array of shoes for sale in the medina. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
We quickly attracted a posse of young men as Mr. El Mounadam kept up a steady narrative, explaining the tanning process in detail. The crumbling buildings around the pits are used for scraping and softening the skins, he said, leading us up a rickety staircase to a low-ceilinged room where one of the young men demonstrated the technique, staring at us as he sliced away with a sharp metal tool.
If this were a thriller instead of a travel tale, this is the moment when the ominous music would kick in. Instead, some of the men took Ben upstairs for more photos, and Mr. El Mounadam and I compared life histories and talked about love. (He’s a romantic.)
Moroccan hospitality may have choreographed our welcome, but American mores are equally ingrained, so in the end, when Mr. El Mounadam hinted around it, I offered him some money for his time and expertise. It was the only moment when we paid for any guidance, and it was well worth it.
Afterward, we found a quiet cafe, which smelled (thankfully) of fresh herbs and juices, and had a cosmopolitan look. Though the medina literally keeps to its own schedule — the 150,000 residents there don’t follow daylight saving time, although outside the gates, the rest of Fez does — modern life is encroaching. Viewing the city through Bab Rasif, one of the entrance gates, you can see the green-and-white tower of a mosque floating above a sea of satellite dishes.
In the square at the entrance, we watched a clutch of little boys playing soccer; some held their right sandal in one hand, trading off footwear so they each had a Croc or sneaker to kick with. The goal-markers were a rock and a plastic bag, but they took it very seriously; the alpha player wore a Cristiano Ronaldo jersey, No. 9. The game was raucous, the black-and-white ball a geometric blur on the white stone tiles, and before long someone had a bloody head. Teammates and opponents swarmed over to check on the injured player before he was led away by hand.
Little girls are a presence in the medina, too, but the boys are bolder, practicing for their roles as future tour guides. In Place Seffarine, a child offered us a pack of tissues for a few dirhams. When we gave the money — pocket change — but refused the tissues, he dashed away, returning with a tiny yellow slipper as a souvenir. “C’est une babouche de Maroc,” he explained, pointing around the corner, where it was made.
Place Seffarine, a breezy square. Ben Sklar for The New York Times
Generosity was easy to find. At the food market near one of the gates, where locals browse for goat cheese and camel meat, we were often beckoned over for “un goût” — a taste. A vendor selling vegetables from a small table, listening to American rap music on a radio and smoking a long hash pipe, even offered us a puff.
We encountered the market on our walk with Mr. Saili, the comb craftsman. We trailed him as he strode through the medina, earning waves and greetings along the way. This man, we sensed, was important. It was our first full day in Fez, and the walk was a dizzying sensory overload, full of unexpected turns and visions, especially when we reached the market.
Here was a fragrant rosewater stand, next to a tableful of live snails, abutting a tray of pastel halvah. He stopped to buy cantaloupe, a treat for lunch. After a trek through garbage-strewn alleyways and three tightly locked doors, he welcomed us into his home. The narrow entryway and dun-colored building opened to a vast, multistory oasis, with high ceilings, blue, green and white tile and traditional woodwork. His wife, Aziza Krimi, had prepared lunch: spiced lamb, served with fluffy pita and French fries. It was easily the best food we had in Fez.
Mr. Saili’s granddaughter Nouha El Alloui joined us and served as a translator. Her grandfather, she said, was 82. He carved his combs and spoons not out of bone but out of cow horns. It was a common skill generations ago, but now practitioners are rare.
At first, Mr. Saili said, he did it just for the money. “But now,” he explained, “it’s a passion.”
“A passion?” his wife repeated, laughing good-naturedly at her husband. Like all good hosts, they insisted that we eat, eat! Ms. Krimi brought out the cantaloupe. A soap opera played on the flat-screen TV, and more family members dropped by to join us. It was as authentic and intimate an experience as we could have imagined.
Afterward, Mr. Saili led us back to his shop, at 39 Rue Mechatine. He sat inside cross-legged and smiling, demonstrating how he worked, stabilizing a comb on his feet as he chiseled its tines. We bought spoons and a little menagerie of creature combs.
It was only later that we noticed the official city placard at the top of the street. Rue Mechatine was once filled with horn-carvers, it said. Now, as we’d just learned, there was only Mr. Saili, who was still waving as we wandered once again into the medina’s tangled, tempting alleyways.
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Melena Ryzik is a reporter for the Culture desk of The New York Times.
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