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

handmade nail.’
    This nail, several hundred years old, was to be the prototype for those David was having made. After months of searching, he had finally found a man with the necessary skills, but there was to be one small difference: the heads of the new nails would be slightly bigger, so that future experts could tell old from new.
    Sandy and I exchanged glances. This was restoration on a whole new level. It wasn’t just popping down to the hardware store and getting a bag of cheap Chinese nails and a bit of four-by-two. There was obviously more to doing up a house here than we realised.
    ‘Would you like to see the house I live in?’ David asked. ‘I’ve had a builder and his team working on it for four years.’
    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