Fez Opens Doors to the Real Morocco
An insider’s view of the country’s cultural capital.
We were somewhere around 90 minutes into a Sufi Muslim ceremony on the edge of the medina when the ants began to take hold. Figuratively, thankfully. But for the Hamadcha brotherhood chanting and swaying in front of us, they seemed very real.
“At this part of the evening,” one of the brothers explained, “we typically will have been singing and playing excitedly for hours, and we need to get up and dance – like we have ants in our pants that need to get out.”
Official ceremonies held at the brotherhood’s lodge in Fez stretch from dusk till dawn, unlike this abbreviated private predinner spectacle at a restored riad, where swallows swooped into the open courtyard for their day’s last snacks. Sitting atop pillows on a marble floor, as impassioned incantations and a cacophony of drums, polyrhythmic handclaps, a gembri (three-stringed lute), and blaring pungis (reed pipes) reverberated off the walls, I could easily imagine how intense and trancelike faithfuls’ nights get.
The evening was an exclusive peek into Morocco’s spiritual side, arranged by Karim Fehry Fassy for art director Korena Bolding and me. The co-founder of Alizés Private works with Virtuoso travel advisors to open the country’s ornately carved cedar doors to what would often go unnoticed or remain inaccessible to outsiders. Fehry Fassy’s connections run deep: The taproot of his ancient family tree draws from the heart of the medina in Fez, Morocco’s first imperial city; a direct ancestor founded the world’s oldest existing university, al-Qarawiyyin, here in AD 859. More recently, his father served as a director of protocol for the late King Hassan II, who oversaw the construction of Casablanca’s landmark Hassan II Mosque in the 1980s. Hassan’s son, King Mohammed VI, added the adjacent Academy of Traditional Arts, in part to help save the country’s craft traditions – many of which originated in Fez – for the next generation of carvers, tilers, leathersmiths, and other artisans.
“Everybody knows Marrakech. Marrakech, Marrakech, Marrakech – they all want to go there,” Fehry Fassy had told me a few months earlier. “They should – it’s a beautiful city, with great restaurants and nightlife and shopping. I love it. I live there.” For a relaxed, under-the-radar surf town and to escape summer’s heat, Essaouira is his spot. The High Atlas is an adventure-travel playground. Casablanca is all business and traffic, the desert is for playing out Lawrence of Arabia fantasies, while the capital, Rabat, is an immaculately landscaped and manicured vision of the country to be. “But if you want to discover the soul of Morocco,” Fehry Fassy said, “I’ll take you to Fez.”
From the rooftop-restaurant terrace of the Palais Faraj hotel, Fez’s medina is more gritty than pretty, but inside the warren of alleys below – some not much more than a shoulder’s width across – there’s splendor rivaled by few other cities. Of all the places I’ve visited, it’s also the one I couldn’t imagine taking on without a guide. Five, ten minutes tops wandering the souks, and you’d be hopelessly lost; Google Maps has a way to go before conquering medieval labyrinths.
The other reason guides are a necessity is that there’s so much in the medina you don’t need to see – stalls hawking trinkets and knockoff designer bags, still-standing residential wards awaiting spruce-ups after a millennium. You could spend a whole day in the world’s largest urban car-free zone and miss its gems: the dyeing alley where workers spread fabrics in the middle of the lane, saturate them with color, and then stamp it in with bare feet as others pull skeins of yarn and silk threads from bubbling pots; the leather and silver souks; the mind-boggling zellige tiling and carvings of al-Attarine Madrasa’s fourteenth-century courtyard; the tannery.
OK, Chouara tannery I likely could have found by scent alone, a one-of-a-kind malodorous blend of raw cow, sheep, and camel hides and hot-tub-size vats of diluted pigeon poop and cow urine (among other things) mingling beneath the Moroccan sun. For more than 1,000 years, workers have toiled in the tubs of all-natural dyes, which use the likes of indigo for blue, saffron for yellow, and poppies for red. Viewed from a terrace above, a sprig of fresh mint in hand from a leather shop’s doorman to crush under your nose, it’s like gazing down on a giant watercolor palette – a vision that far overpowers the smell.
