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

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