First impressions of another culture
What I was able to notice in my first days in Fez.
Fez unsettled me, and not because of the monuments. It was the alleys, and a boy who took me through them to exactly where I wanted to go without my ever asking. To tell how you get lost in Fez, though, you first have to say where it is you get lost: because Fez is three cities set one beside the other.
Fez el-Bali is the Idrisid medina, founded at the end of the eighth century: the cultural and spiritual capital of Morocco (the university teaches theology above all) and today the largest pedestrian urban area in the world, with some 9,400 alleys and walls whose construction began in the eleventh century. Fez el-Jdid, "the new one", is the citadel the Marinid sultan Abu Yusuf Ya'qub had built in 1276 outside those walls to house the palace and the government: a choice which, historians say, reflects the rulers' wariness of a Fassi population famously independent. The Ville Nouvelle, finally, is the city of the French protectorate, the one of boulevards and cafés.
The royal palace, Dar el-Makhzen, takes up eighty hectares of el-Jdid and is still used by the king, so it is closed to visitors. All you see of it are the chased copper doors on place des Alaouites. They can look ancient, but they were in fact made between 1969 and 1971, when Hassan II turned the palace entrance away from the old Méchouar and towards the new city. They are wood clad in sheets of copper, chased by hand by a local craftsman to a design by the Fassi architect Mohammed Tazi; the copper is then polished periodically with lemon, whose acid dissolves the oxide that sun and rain leave on the surface. That is why, after fifty years in the open, they are still golden.
A city made of cities
Anyone who gets lost in the medina of Fez, and everyone does, tends to see it as a single labyrinth. It is in fact a mosaic of almost self-contained units. The quarter, in Arabic ḥawma (حومة), is organised around a main alley, the derb (درب), often closed at night by a gate, and historically it held everything daily life needed without anyone leaving its bounds: a neighbourhood mosque for the five prayers, a Quranic school (msid, مسيد) where the children learned the sacred text by heart, a communal oven (ferran, فران), a public bath (hammam, حمّام) and a fountain (seqqaya, سقاية). These are the five elements still named today as the typical fittings of a medina quarter. It is the arrangement Roger Le Tourneau described in his study of pre-colonial Fez (Fès avant le protectorat, 1949, complete on Gallica), still the reference on the social and economic life of the medina, and which Stefano Bianca later framed as a recurring module of the traditional Arab city (Urban Form in the Arab World, 2000).
The neighbourhood mosque is also the neighbourhood clock. The five calls follow the sun, not the time zone, and slip by a few minutes each day: in August they fall around five in the morning, one o'clock, five in the afternoon, eight, and half past nine in the evening (the official times are set by the Ministry of Habous and published daily). With hundreds of minarets that are not synchronised to the second, the call does not begin: it propagates, like a wave crossing the basin from one slope to the other.
Oven and bath are not a casual pairing. In the traditional city the ferran and the hammam were often built against each other, sharing a wall, and the waste heat from the bread oven went on to warm the bath; the hammam had its own furnace all the same, kept burning by the farnatchi (فرناتشي), and a single woodpile served two purposes. Houses had no oven of their own. It is this weave of shared services, more than the architecture of the individual buildings, that explains the social cohesion the quarters of Fez kept into the twentieth century.
Each family carried its raw loaves to the baker, who recognised them on their return by a mark, or by the cloth they were wrapped in.
Each family carried its raw loaves to the baker, who recognised them on their return by a mark, or by the cloth they were wrapped in.
Over a coffee at a street stall I found a ready-made spice blend to stir into the grounds. To make it at home: cardamom, anise, ginger, cinnamon and fennel seed, finely crushed and mixed in equal parts. The traditional dose is two teaspoons per hundred grams of ground coffee, so about a third of a teaspoon for a three-cup moka, straight into the filter with the coffee.
Fez sits in a basin fed by the Oued Fès, which rises at Ras al-Ma, a dozen kilometres upstream; over the centuries the river was divided into a network of channels that, using nothing but the natural gradient, carried running water to mosques, hammams, public fountains, tanneries and private houses (Mohamed Métalsi, Fès: la ville essentielle, 2003). The neighbourhood fountain was the far end of that network. The system is largely degraded today: the central branch, the Bou Khrareb, was progressively covered over from the 1950s because of pollution, and as late as 2003 UNESCO was still flagging as a threat to the site the covering of a 250-metre stretch with a concrete slab.
The tanneries sit downstream of everything else, and not by chance: they are the last user of the water, the one that gives it back dirty. The largest, Chouara, has worked the same site since the eleventh century. The hides go first into the white vats, where quicklime dissolves the hair and pigeon guano, rich in ammonia, softens the skin; then, washed and dried, they end up in the coloured pits: saffron for yellow, poppy for red, indigo for blue, henna for orange, mint for green. The men stand thigh-deep in the pits and work the hides with their feet. The sprig of mint they hand you on the terrace is not a courtesy.
The doors
The medina is made of thresholds in series. The walls filter who enters the city; the gate of the derb, closed at night, filters who enters the quarter; the house door filters who enters the family. At each passage the circle of those entitled to be on the other side narrows, and this logic runs right down to the detail of the gate. Many gates in the medina have a small door cut inside the large one: the first for everyday passage, exposing the inside to the street as little as possible; the second for pack animals, loads and occasions. Often there are two leaves, of different size and weight. The guides of Fez say the distinct sound let whoever was in the house tell who was knocking, familiar or stranger, man or woman, and let the women prepare before opening. The explanation circulates in several variants and is not documented by historical study, so it should be taken for what it is: a plausible oral tradition around a real constructional detail. What is certain is that the door, like the bent vestibule (skifa, سقيفة) that comes immediately after and stops the courtyard being seen from the street, is part of an architecture meant to protect domestic life from the public gaze.
The pattern, it should be said, is not unique to Fez: it recurs in Marrakech, Tunis, Aleppo. What makes Fez a case of its own is the scale, 280 hectares of medieval fabric still inhabited according to the site's UNESCO listing, and the survival, at least in part, of the water infrastructure that made it possible.
Blind alleys
The derb is blind by design, and that produces two things: a signage system and an economy. The signage is discreet. The street-name plates come in different shapes, and the shape is the message: hexagonal plate, dead end; rectangular plate, the street goes on. The rule has exceptions and the plates are not everywhere, but once you have learned it you walk differently.
The economy is the boys'. To one of them, out of politeness, I said which riad (رياض) I was heading for. That was enough: he stepped in front of me and began to guide me, without my asking and without my being able to stop him. Every time I turned into a dead end by mistake, he was there to pull me out. At the door I tried to explain that I would rather give him something, food, a drink; there was no way to make myself understood. He wanted money. Guidebooks call him a faux guide and advise never saying where you are going. It makes sense. But that boy knew the alleys better than any map, and for that knowledge nobody will ever pay him more than a few dirhams at a time.
The dogs and the cats
Cats are a constant presence in every corner of Morocco, as I had occasion to notice from the moment I landed. Unlike the Greek islands, where cats were kept aboard the boats to protect the stores from rats, here the cats are native, descended from the African wildcat Felis lybica lybica, whose natural range covers the whole of North Africa, Morocco included.
The local culture works in their favour: no public control, Muslims generally well disposed towards cats and the medina environment full of shelter and street food: the same habitat of alleys and workshops that made Istanbul the other cat capital of the world (Kedi, 2016).
Abu Hurayra, which translates as "Father of a Kitten", was a companion of Muhammad — the byname is said to come from a kitten he carried in his sleeve. See Daily Hadith Online.
Abu Hurayra, which translates as "Father of a Kitten", was a companion of Muhammad — the byname is said to come from a kitten he carried in his sleeve. See Daily Hadith Online.
The dogs, by contrast, you do not see. The few I came across were never on a lead and always at the margins: a patch of waste ground outside the walls, the shade of a building site. It is not that they are absent, it is that the medina is not their place. Islamic tradition holds a dog's saliva to be impure, and that is enough to keep it out of the houses and the alleys: the cat is inside, the dog is outside. And outside, rabies is endemic, which has made coexistence a matter of public health: the management of strays in Morocco has so far been mostly culling, and only in 2025 did a study published in the WHO's journal for the Eastern Mediterranean propose moving to a model of care, sterilisation, vaccination and marking. The same ecosystem that protects the cats, no control and food everywhere, turns for the dogs into a sentence.
What courtesy is worth
What unsettled me was not getting lost. It was discovering that courtesy, in Fez, is worth something. Telling a boy where you are going, answering someone who asks where you come from: gestures that weigh nothing in Europe because nobody picks them up, and that here are taken seriously, and used. In one afternoon I learned to measure them out, to say no without hostility, to hold the route I had chosen. I do not feel less courteous than before. I feel like someone who has understood that courtesy is a currency, and that spending it well is an art everyone here knows.