The Medina

How I miss the medinas of Morocco. Just now I put in "Morocco medina" into Google's image search, and looking through the pictures brought back a wave of memories. Not specific event memories, but memories about the feel of the place, the sights, the smells, the sounds, the people, the routine, the mosques, the beggars, the cats, the shops . . .

Medina literally means "city" in Arabic. In colloquial language, however, medina refers to the old section of a city. Every city in Morocco has a medina, usually surrounded by high walls. These are the old cities, from hundreds of years before the modern apartment buildings, stores, and businesses built in the European tradition. The medina is a maze (quite literally) of tiny alleys full of houses, shops, schools, vendors, mosques, and hammams (public baths). The streets are lined with small "dukans", loosely translated as shops. I say loosely translated because many of these shops are little more than counters in front of tiny holes in the wall where people sell everything from chocolate to batteries, fresh mint to every kind of button imagineable, Arabic and French newspapers to head scarves, bootleg cassettes to beautiful fabric. Some dukans are big enough to walk into, often selling clothing or dried fruit and nuts. In Marrakesh the medina is full of people selling brightly colored slippers. In Fez there is much more woodwork.

The medina is the center of life. It is full of activity and commotion. Partly because the alleys are so narrow, the streets are always crowded with a great number of people walking from one place to another and a great number of people simply standing around: maybe talking, maybe watching, maybe begging. Every day I passed dozens of beggars in the medina.

The medina is also full of mosques and schools, as well as fountains where those without running water can fill up buckets with fresh water. You can never count out the motorcycles and donkeys that create extra commotion, or the infrequent cars that barely can make it between the walls.

Beyond the small shops and buildings, there are hundreds of people in the medina selling their wares in the middle of the street. There are men dressed in red with metal cups that will give you a cup of water for 1 dirham (10 cents). There are people on bicycles with baskets of fresh oranges. There are people with tarps in the middle of the larger streets selling almost anything. One alley in the Rabat medina we called the vegetable street because it would be lined end to end with people selling every kind of fruit and vegetable in baskets and on various tarps. At night, the lights come on and light up the smoke and steam from freshly cooked meat and or freshly fried pancakes and pastries at small carts wheeled in during the late afternoon. In the spring for a few weeks you can find people selling snails, either still alive or freshly cooked.

The medina has a distinct smell. There is the smell of dust and dirt, mixed with the smell of live chickens (for sale), and freshly cooked pastries and meat. The wealth of medina sounds are foreign to a western ear: the muezzin's call to prayer, vendors calling out about their wares, much loud talking, tapes playing with chanting of the Quran, children playing, beggars feebly asking for money. . . almost all in Arabic, with a little French and English thrown out to the lone tourists. It is all very loud because the walls lining the streets keep the sound in.

The medina is the poorer part of the city. People there are more traditional. It also tends to be more crime ridden (and with such crowds, it's no wonder). For awhile when I was in Rabat during the beginning of the Iraq war (April 2003), US Embassy personnel and their families were forbidden from going to the medina, because of "security concerns". My fellow students and I had no such regulations: our school was located in the middle of the medina, and about half of us lived with families in the medina. The heart and soul of the city is in the medina, in my opinion. I miss being there every day, in the middle of so much life and activity, history and culture.

I took very few pictures of the medina when I was in Morocco. The medina was a place I became very familiar with, and a home to me. We constantly saw tourists taking gawking photos of the medina, and I could never bring myself to do the same. There was too much orientalism in that act: capturing an exotic culture in an instant so I could neatly hang it up on my western bedroom wall. Given the traditional, poorer, and disadvantaged nature of much of the medina, it just didn't feel right taking a slew of pictures for myself. As a result, all I can offer you of a visual glimpse in is some pictures I found around the internet.