Getting lost in Fez, Morocco
Wander through the labyrinth of this ancient cityBy Miranda Ward
We wanted somewhere to get lost in. Neither of us knew a thing about Fez apart from that we liked how it sounded—the name itself seemed a riddle. 
“The history of Fes,” I read, “is composed of wars and murders, triumphs of arts and sciences, and a good deal of imagination.” (Walter Harris, Land of an African Sultan)
As it turns out, Fez is both a world suspended in time and a paradox of entirely modern proportions. The city was preserved by its own unmaking under the French Resident-General Lyautey, who oversaw the transfer of many of Fez’s economic and political functions to the coastal cities in the early 20th century and declared Fes el Bali, the old city, an historical monument.
He built the European Ville Nouvelle nearby, which nowadays pulsates with traffic and a jungle of billboards advertising everything from mobile phones to toothpaste. Fez lost the chance to become a contemporary center of commerce and civic activity, but its medieval heart was guarded against upheaval.
Today, an estimated quarter of Fez’s 800,000 residents live in the ancient medina-city of Fes el Bali, which, apart from its electricity and its tourists, might exist in a world without the West. This is the part of Fez that warrants spending the most time in—the part of Fez ripe with mystery and seething with the exotic.
Western visitors to Fez are common enough, however, that the city is not inaccessible. Like the rest of the country, it maintains a strong adherence to Islam, but it has also begun to shift its mindset as more and more of the city’s industry becomes tourism-based.
Each evening, after a tajine and a Moroccan salad for dinner, my travel partner and I would wander to a café near our hotel to sit and sip mint tea. I was the only woman in the café at this hour, and local men lounging before their evening exodus to mosque sometimes shook heads or tutted disapprovingly—but staff served me readily, and there was no discomfort in the experience. And it’s worth taking advantage of the city’s openness to outsiders, because everything in Fez, from the smell of the leather (dyed locally at the famous tanneries and made supple with pigeon shit) to the taste of the mint tea is an incredible, blissful surrender.
My companion and I stayed at a little hotel at the edge of the medina, near Bab Boujeloud, the majestic blue-green gate which serves as one of four main entrance points to Fes el Bali. We quickly discovered the great beauty of Fez: that no matter how many sights, souks, medersas and monuments you intend to visit, you will not find them all, unless by happy accident.
The medina is made of a thousand streets, subtle alleyways and sudden plazas; retracing your steps—or following the directions in a book—is often nothing but an exercise in hilarious futility. Fez holds its secrets close; it would take a lifetime to truly learn the place.
Instead, we became detectives in the city. With a guidebook at hand, to decipher, if we could, whatever sights we might 
happen upon, we spent entire days wandering. We breathed in dust and the smells of donkey excrement, chickens waiting to be slain, rich herbs and spices; and followed nothing but our own erratic whims.
We crisscrossed the dusty streets, stopping for tea when the heat made our heads spin, exploring the dilapidated beauty of ruined palaces, swimming through a sea of rainbow-colored rugs and glass jars and jewelry, pausing for respite in the cool shade of a medersa. We strolled through museums that featured everything from woodwork to—bizarrely—“utensils pour le couscous et le petit lait”.
One afternoon, we met up with a friend of a friend, Ali, a native Fassi who runs a successful shop near the Place en Nejjarin (carpenter’s square) in the medina. Before I had even properly introduced myself, he offered us tea, and I sat on a pile of rugs while I waited for the hot glass, stuffed with mint, to cool. I had a sense of being overwhelmed by beauty: in every corner of the tiny shop were beautiful things, casually arranged on shelves, a kaleidoscope of greens and blues and oranges and golds.
There were perfume lances and necklaces, silk pillowcases and ceramic plates, teakettles and mirrors. Everything looked lovingly, carefully handcrafted—much of it, apparently, by Ali’s brother-in-law. He pointed at the silver carvings ringing a tea glass: “my brother-in-law does this,” he told us; pointed then at the copper inlay on a serving bowl: “my brother-in-law…”. He said it four or five times before it dawned on me that he was referring to several different brothers-in-law: there are twelve children in his family.
These were our aimless hours: we understood time only in terms of the muezzin’s call to prayer, and the occasional pangs of our own hunger, and the sun crawling its slow, hot way across an unmarred sky. And in a city like Fez, aimlessness, perhaps, should be your only aim.
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