In the old medina of Fès, the call to prayer loses itself in a cacophony of sound. The call, the voices, from so many mosques blend into one.
It reminds me of Zanzibar, the old city, with its twisting maze of streets, the electrical wires haphazardly strung across the ancient streets.
But, compared to Zanzibar City’s stone town, Fès is far older and far larger. It’s a place where they build a “new city” more than 500 years ago.
If Istanbul is several different cities built on top of each, the Fès medina is a city built on top of itself.
At times, I have to duck as the second story of a building juts out above the street, you turn a corner and there are stairs down to an alleyway. Though, are there really alleyways and streets in this twisting warren of narrow paths?
Somehow, we don’t get lost. At least not much. There are always wrong turns and confident steps in the opposite direction of where we want to go, but there’s always a trail of small landmarks, signs, shops and architectural features to lead us back. Moments where you say, “oh, were here already” – a statement that is always a bit of a question.
Shops open and close at odd hours, many of them have no exterior signs and big doors cover them completely when they’re closed. There are a few consistent things – a table where snacks and water are sold, seemingly, 24 hours a day; a place where there is always someone cooking and selling food – though it is often a different man and different food.
The city has lasted this way because it works. In the medina, there are always cool shadows to walk in, even in the heat of the day.
The riad, the traditional Moroccan-style house where we stay, is tall, narrow and shockingly cool. The rooms are built around an interior courtyard one storey below ground level (though where, exactly, ground level is in a city like this is an open questions). Perhaps courtyard is not the right word, because it feels more like a room but, a few stories up, it is open to the sky.
In this space, it is perhaps five, maybe 10, degrees cooler than the outside. My fingers get cold as I write. Our host turns on a heat lamp when he serves breakfast.
The rooms of the house are up a narrow, low-ceilinged staircase of narrow, inconsistent stairs (the house is like the city).
The rooms all face into the cool courtyard, there are no exterior windows.
On the roof, there is a whole other city. A world of roosters and cats, laundry lines and minarets. A place where towers and walls are visible on distant hills.
In the new town, the colonial-era Ville-Nouveau, there are wide boulevards where vendors rent out PowerWheels and virtual reality headsets.
We eat sandwiches on round, but not flat, bread; salads with every ingredient and rotisserie chicken. The French left behind desserts and baked goods: croissants, chocolatines, mille-feuilles.
In the medina and the old Jewish quarter, the glass counters of sweet shops are full of wasps and I wonder how many times the vendors have been stung.
Few things are more ubiquitous in Morocco than cafés. Everywhere, in every town we went. Seats outside, all facing the street, soccer on the TV inside and somewhere a back room where men smoke hash.
The bars we do find are, for the most part, dark, smokey places, blocked off from the outside – it is illegal for Moroccans to drink in a place where they may be seen by people passing by the establishment. Tourists may drink on terraces but we find few of those.
Snacks are almost always provided, fried sardines, popcorn and peanuts are the standards. Tomato and cucumber salad is almost as common. In one place, we are given a plate of fruit along with our popcorn and Flag Spéciale.
Moroccan beer isn’t bad, neither is the wine.
Everywhere in Fès, especially the medina, is a market. There are shops and street vendors everywhere, temporary marketplaces in the squares, hawkers selling goods as they walk. Where the souq, the proper marketplace of the medina, begins and ends is never quite clear.
It is not quite at the level of Istanbul, a city where every inch of space seems dedicated to some form of commerce, formal or informal, where even the pedestrian tunnels under highways are lined with shops, but it is almost there.
On a larger street with cars just outside the medina, there are stores selling spices piled into tall pyramids, shops selling electronics, others selling belts and sunglasses. In the medina, clothing for sale is hung on the outside walls of the little shops, name brand knockoffs – some purport to be Adidas, Kappa or Nike, others are branded with the “Mike” swoosh and the ck of “Calvin Karma.”
In the souk, it all mixes together, the tourist shops selling leather goods, carpets and silver tea sets next to butcher shops with live chickens behind the counter as if to advertise how fresh the meat is.
It feels ancient. As a man drives a donkey through the narrow carless streets, if you squint your eyes and ignore the cell phone cases and the imitation track pants, you have a sense of how this town has always been.
After a week and a half in Morocco, Spain is something else.
Come back in two weeks for the third and final edition of Ancient cities in the modern world, a story that will take us back to Europe, to the city of Cádiz in Spain. If you haven’t read part one, “It's Istanbul not Constantinople,” feel free to check it out. Thanks for reading Dispatches from Gauteng, if you liked this dispatch - or any of the others, why don’t you tell a friend about it? We all need something a little timeless to read during these days of quartinue and lockdown.