Sunday, while we were wandering through the shoulder-wide walkways with Hakim, it became clear that calling Fes a walled Medina referred to more than the exterior fourteen-gated rampart surrounding the town.
Inside the Medina, whether we turned left or right, there was always a seamless wall two-to-three stories high on either side of us. This wall was punctuated periodically by the wooden doors of the dars where residents lived. The heavy iron studded doors usually had two knockers, one in the middle for strangers, one on the upper left for friends. High above the doors opening out from either the second or third floors was a small window covered by a curved perforated metal shield that allowed the person living there to look below without being seen.
Call it a medieval sense of security, or Dark Ages paranoia, it’s hard not to dismiss the feeling of incarceration while serpentining the wall-hugging streets. We finished our tour of the Medina stepping over scattered produce, batting away the flies, avoiding the cats while eyeing workers bent over their tasks like living dioramas of craft guild survival before the Industrial Revolution.
Then we were back in the sunlight taking a ride up to yet another fortress perched on a hill that gave us a birds eye view of the jammed together city cluster that is Fes. Looking down from our vantage point it didn’t look so claustrophobic or so singular in its design. Merely a jumble of mismatched white buildings with a lot of dish antennas. Maybe it was just one of Ali Baba’s bad dreams. It was good to be awake.
The walkways made me think of slot canyons in the West. In Spain they say the narrow alleyways are to keep it cool in the summer but these seem a bit too narrow.
There aren’t many that we saw that are that narrow but the Medina as a whole is cooler than it is outside the walls. And yes, I hadn’t thought of that resemblance to some of our slot canyons.
The walls make me a bit claustrophobic as I am wondering how long you have to be in them. Perhaps you see daylight ahead. There were close walls in the old city of Spain but not that close. Seems like Fes is interesting!
I certainly couldn’t stay in them for very long either, fortunately they are short spans. Most are wider.