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By Root 765 0

simple private home. Furthermore, between the floors of a building, many homes have hollowed-out areas suitable for stashing food and hiding fugitives. An early hub for the spice routes from south and east, Fez made use of the spices and ingredients from other cultures, particularly when it came to the practical necessities of repelling potential invaders. Air-dried meat, pickled vegetables, preserved fruit, cured food, a protein diet consisting largely of animals easily raised and contained behind high walls – all remain features of Fez’s cuisine. The preponderance of inaccessible wells and walled gardens are design features one might well find quaint and even luxurious now. Back then, they were shrewd and even vital additions to the neighborhood. Wealthier citizens of the old city still pride themselves on growing their own dates, figs, lemons, oranges, olives, and almonds, and pulling their own water out of the ground. Situated in the middle of a wide valley, surrounded by unforgiving hills and plains, invaders almost always began to go hungry before the residents and were forced to withdraw long before the food ran out inside the walls.

We followed our porter up and down nameless dark alleys, past sleeping beggars, donkeys, soccer-playing kids, merchants selling gum and cigarettes, until we arrived at a dimly lighted doorway in a featureless outer wall. A few sharp knocks echoed through an inner chamber, and an eager young man appeared to welcome us into a deceptively plain passageway large enough to accommodate riders on horseback. Around a corner, I stepped into another world. A spacious antechamber opened up onto a quiet enclosed patio, with a round breakfast table situated beneath a lemon tree. The air smelled of oleander and fresh flowers. Looming up in the center of a vast open space of terraced patios with tiled floors rose what can only be described as a palace, a gargantuan high-ceilinged structure surrounded by outbuildings, a large garden with fruit trees, a small pond, and a well – the residence, it appeared, of a medieval merchant prince, all within the impenetrable walls of the crowded medina.

My host was Abdelfettah, a native of the old city of Fez. Educated in Britain, he spoke with the unmistakable accent of the British upper classes – but is, as they say there, quite the other thing. A few years ago, with his English wife, Naomi, and two children, he’d returned to his beloved hometown and begun work restoring this magnificent estate tile by tile, brick by brick, doing much of the work himself. He now wore only traditional garb, djellaba and babouches (pointed yellow slippers), having turned his back on the world outside his walls. Abdelfettah and Naomi have dedicated themselves to preserving the ancient culture and traditions of Fez – and their own luxurious piece of that tradition. No television and no radio were on the premises. Outside the main house and kitchen annex, Abdelfettah maintained a studio, where he spent hours each day creating indescribably intricate reliefs in white plaster, hand-carving endlessly repetitious non-representational designs and patterns into its surface. At the far end of the garden, construction was under way for a center for Moroccan music, where local musicians and aficionados will assemble and work.

I was taken through a well-equipped kitchen and breakfast area to the main building. It was a towering square structure, built around a large interior courtyard. The inner walls rose over a hundred feet in a wide, wide shaft to the roof and sky, every inch decorated with precise hand-painted and -assembled mosaics of small white and blue tile. The cedar doors to my room on the ground floor, which opened onto the courtyard and a gurgling fountain, were at least six times my height, and carved with the same kind of skillfully executed patterns as Abdelfettah’s plaster reliefs, many of which occupied spaces over entryways and interior windows. I could easily imagine two big bald guys, shirtless and wearing silk pantaloons and fezzes, flanking each side of the almost ridiculously