Fez
— — a thousand-year city that still smells of cedar and leather.
Not only on a wall.
“Fes el-Bali, the old medina, was founded in 789 by Idris I and his son Idris II on opposite banks of the Oued Fez. Inside the walls, the lanes are too narrow for cars. Donkeys still carry hides up to the Chouara tannery. The al-Qarawiyyin mosque and university, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, holds one of the oldest continuously operating libraries in the world. Smoke from cedar woodworking lifts over the rooftops at dusk.
Fez, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Fez sits in a basin in the foothills of the Middle Atlas, about 190 kilometres east of Rabat, in the Fès-Meknès region. The metropolitan area is home to roughly 1.2 million people. Fes el-Bali, the old medina, was founded in 789 by Idris I and expanded by Idris II in 808 as the capital of the Idrisid dynasty. The newer Fes el-Jdid was built in the thirteenth century by the Marinids. UNESCO listed the medina as a World Heritage Site in 1981.
The al-Qarawiyyin was founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, a young woman who had inherited a fortune from her merchant father and used it to build a mosque and madrasa for the growing community of Arab refugees from Kairouan. The teaching halls grew into one of the longest continuously running universities in the world, predating Bologna by two centuries. The library, restored in 2016, still holds manuscripts from the ninth century onward, including a Qur'an copy on camel parchment.
The medina holds about 9,000 lanes within its walls, the largest car-free urban area in the world. The Chouara tannery, in use since at least the eleventh century, occupies a courtyard of round stone vats where hides are softened in lime and pigeon droppings before being dyed with saffron, indigo, henna, poppy, and mint. Above the vats, balconies open from the leather shops, where mint is offered against the smell. Cedar woodworking, brass, and silk weaving are concentrated in their own quarters.