the vibrancy of Marrakech

By the time we finished breakfast our first full day in Merrakech, Ouidad, our guide for the day, was waiting for us. She greeted us in French, then seemed to be confused when we told her English. Just as I had a bit of panic, she announced, “just kidding” and we were off. We loved her from that moment.

Some terminology clarification:

• medina = a fortified citadel (the area inside the walls)
• casbah = the area surrounding a North African citadel (the old city area just outside the walls)
• souk = marketplace (typically inside the medina)

Now that that’s sorted, on to the medina and its souks.

Two laws of note that affect life in Marrakech and its medina:

1. Nothing can be built higher than the Koutoubia minaret, so buildings are typically no more than three stories, perhaps with a rooftop terrace restaurant. Consequently, while Marrakech is basically flat, there are lots of stairs:

2. Motorized vehicles within the media must be less than 50cc. So scooters of 49cc run rampant in the narrow streets and alleyways:

Ouidad not only showed us through the medina and its souks, she also talked to us about Moroccan culture. She adheres to what she calls “hijab light,” with her head scarf only lightly covering her hair. We agree with her that it’s what’s in one’s heart that matters; we are more alike than different; and people should spend much less energy judging others.

Indeed.

As we walked through the medina, we noticed areas of earthquake damage:

Our first stop was Medersa Ali ben Youssef, a Koran school that dates from the 16^th century. We learned that Koran schools are not schools where students study the Koran; rather, memorization of the Koran is expected before a student will be admitted to the school. In its heyday, 900 boys lived in 134 rooms arranged around 13 courtyards, 54 on ground floor and 80 on upper floor. The best students got windows overlooking the patio rather than interior rooms, and a student had to work to keep his good room throughout the school term.

The medersa is covered in colored tiles called zellige. If you only have time to see one thing in Merrakech, this is the one you want to see:

Then to explore the souks:

I will let a couple of the souks speak for themselves – as the signs at their entryways explained:

Souk El Haddadine:  I am known as the place to go for wrought iron, where one can hear the sounds of iron being worked from the adjacent alleyways. It is a deafening noise, and there are pieces of metal everywhere. Artisans in the small workshops lined up across from one another on the small main street work the red-hot iron into all sorts of shapes, be they straight, curved, or twisted. Craftsmen here traditionally manufacture interior and exterior household windows, door locks, spindles, animal cages, farming tools, and more. The range of what they make has expanded and is now more oriented toward an urban d tourist clientele. Decorative ironwork is therefore an extension of traditional ironwork that now includes various products such as lounge furniture, tables, chairs, beds, screens, balustrades, staircase handrails, consoles, lamps, garden furniture, modern furniture and more.

Souk Des Teinturiers:  I am the souk of a thousand and one colors, but they come at a cost: the hard labor of the Sebbaghine dyers. I provide the weaving workshops with the yarn they need to produce all of the carpets you see in the medina. While there were once many dyeing workshops, now only a dozen remain. Prepared skeins of white yarn are brought here by their owners to the dyers, who weight them in large scales. Inside, where small rooms serve as dyeing workshops, the dyers place the yarn in pots of boiling water. The yarn is then dyed using natural materials: wild almond for green, pomegranate peel or saffron threads for yellow, indigo for blue, and poppy for red. The skeins of yarn are then hung in other semi-detached rooms in the dyeing workshops. After they are drained, they are taken out and hung on the walls and old trellises in the area, giving it its colorful design. The colors obtained are not always the same, with different shades being produced through the drying process. Stalls and workshops sell various handicrafts in the adjacent streets:

The doors!

And cats everywhere:

We hadn’t planned to, but we bought a carpet. Ouidad took us to a carpet museum/cooperative, where we were shown samples of the different types of Atlas carpets. We agreed on one, then haggled and finally got what we wanted when Ouidad emphasized that we lived in Spain, so the shipping included in the price involved a regular truck into Spain, not freight to the U.S.:

We now have a touch of Marrakech in our home.