Fez has fascinated European writers for a century. Here is a short selection of their impressions.
Some Writers' Impressions of Fez
IN MOROCCO, BY EDITH WARTON, 1920
pp. 71 and 79
Many-walled Fez rose up before us out of the plain toward the end of the day.
The walls and towers we saw were those of the upper town, Fez Eldjid (the New), which lies on the edge of the plateau and hides from view Old Fez tumbling down below it into the ravine of the Oued Fez.
Thus approached, the city presents to view only a long line of ramparts and fortresses, merging into the wide tawny plain and framed in barren mountains. Not a house is visible outside the walls, except, at a respectful distance, the few unobtrusive buildings of the European colony; and not a village breaks the desolation of the landscape.
As we drew nearer, the walls towered close over us, and skirting them we came to a bare space outside a great horseshoe gate, and found ourselves suddenly in the foreground of a picture by Carpaccio or Gentile Bellini. . . .
. . . . On each side of the street the houses hung over us like fortresses, leaning across the narrow strip of blue and throwing out great beams and buttresses to prop each other's bulging sides. Windows there were none on the lower floors; only here and there an iron-barred slit stuffed with rags and immemorial filth, from which a lean cat would suddenly spring out, and scuttle off under an archway like a witch's familiar.
Some of these descending lanes were packed with people, others as deserted as a cemetery; and it was strange to pass from the thronged streets leading to the bazaars to the profound and secretive silence of a quarter of well-to-do dwelling-houses, where only a few veiled women attended by negro slaves moved noiselessly over the clean cobblestones, and the sound of fountains and runnels came from hidden courtyards and over garden-walls.
FEZ CITY OF ISLAM, BY TITUS BURCKHARDT, 1960
p. 7
. . . the street is like a deep, half-dark ravine which turns unexpectedly, sometimes here, sometimes there, often covered in by bridges from one building to another and only wide enough to allow two mules to squeeze past each other. Everywhere the cry Balek! Balek! ('Take care! Take care!') rings out. Thus do the mule drivers and the porters with heavy loads on their heads make their way through the crowd.
Only further down do the shops begin, where the traveller on arrival may find his necessities; there too are the saddlers, the basket-makers and the cookshop-owners, the latter preparing hearty meals on little charcoal fires. We proceeded past them into the street of the spice-dealers (Suq al-Attarin), which runs through the entire town centre, and in which one shop lies hard against the next, a row of simple plain boxes, with shuttered doors in front, just as in Europe in the Middle Ages, and with no more space than will allow the merchant to sit down amongst his piled-up wares.
Nothing stirs the memory more than smells; nothing so effectively brings back the past. Here indeed was Fez: the scent of cedar wood and fresh olives, the dry, dusty smell of heaped-up corn, the pungent smell of freshly tanned leather, and finally, in the Suq al-Attarin, the medley of all the perfumes of the Orient-for here are on sale all the spices that once were brought by merchants from India to Europe as the most precious of merchandise. And every now and again one would suddenly become aware of the sweet smell of sandalwood incense, wafted from the inside of one of the mosques.
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, BY EVELYN WAUGH, 1945
p. 202 (Penguin edition)
Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town.
. . . I set out after dinner, with the consular porter going ahead lantern in hand. Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the staples of France - Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Louvre - I had thought it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars; where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke - now I knew what had drawn Sebastian here and held him so long.
THE CALIPH'S HOUSE, BY TAHIR SHAH, 2006
p. 7
Our starting point was Fez, undoubtedly Morocco's greatest jewel. It is the only medieval Arab city that remains entirely intact. Walking through the labyrinth of streets that make up the vast Medina is like stepping into A Thousand and One Nights. The smells, sights and sounds bombard the senses. A stroll of a few feet can be an overwhelming experience.
For centuries, Fes was a place of impressive wealth, a centre of scholarship and trade. Its houses reflect a confidence in Arab architecture almost never seen elsewhere, their decor profiting from a line of apprentices unbroken for a thousand years. We found the alleyways of the old city teaming with workshops, where the traditional skills of metal-work and leather tanning, of mosaic design, weaving, ceramics and marquetry were still transferred from father to son.
FÈS, BY JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD, 1930
p. 22
Much luxury, no innovation. In architecture, as in everything else, the Fassi follows tradition. Too lazy to conserve, too little gifted to invent, what he does today is exactly what he did yesterday. In the cities of Europe, the variations of style bring constantly to our eyes the contrast of the past and the present, and remind us all the time of a way of life and of tastes that have ceased to exist. Nothing like that in Fez.
Ideas that never change, indeed something resembling an instinct, mean that in Fez there is only one age and one style: that of yesterday. It is the site of a miracle – that of suppressing the passage of time. This has given the city its unique character – unique perhaps in the universe, certainly in the Mediterranean world.
THE LIFE OF MY CHOICE, BY WILFRED THESIGER, 1987
p. 258 (Fontana edition)
Of all the cities I have seen, only Constantinople, viewed across the Golden Horn from Pera, and Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, compared with Fez from its encircling hills.