The El Abdi family sells doors. You don’t often see a door shop; even rarer is a shop selling doors such as these. Ornately decorated portals, heavy with metal and wood, they speak of forbidden worlds; rich interiors fiercely protected from prying eyes. They are doors to a vanished world.
It’s not just doors. Inside the labyrinthine three-storey shop, every surface is covered with similar relics: lanterns and vases and trunks and bags and cabinets, made of glass and tin and wood and bone. One of the owners, Abdel, tells me in fluent English first about the wares – the silver trunks decorated with fishbone and camel bone and saffron, the carvings on the Tuareg doors that reveal where the craftsman came from – and then about the shop.
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His family has run this store for 300 years, he tells us, and sources items from across Morocco, with rare specimens coming from as far afield as Mali. With genuine sadness, he talks about the pre-fabricated goods on offer in the souk and says his family prefers this out-of-the-way location on the edge of the Mellah, or Jewish quarter. This, he tells me, is the real Marrakech – not the jostling, tourist-driven crush in the souks further north.
Although I leave without buying a door, his sales pitch has worked. Intrigued by his tales, I take a right instead of heading left as planned, and wander into the heart of the Mellah.
There are few Jews left in Marrakech but for centuries they formed a significant community, controlling the important sugar trade and dominating other key industries including banking, jewellery, metalwork and tailoring. Just as European cities confined the Jews to ghettos, Marrakech’s rulers created the Mellah, which Jews were unable to leave between sundown and sun-up.
In its 16th-century heyday the Mellah was an appealing neighbourhood, with gardens and fountains as well as souks and synagogues, though it eventually declined into poverty. These days it’s almost entirely Muslim and almost entirely residential. A stroll through its streets offers a welcome respite from the constant crowds and cajoling shopkeepers elsewhere in the medina.
These quiet streets allow you to take in the old walls and the character of the individual properties: the dramatic red paint on one house, the crumbling wooden sills and doors on another, the cheerful pink paint job on a local butcher.
Even the shops are different here. In most Marrakech souks, endless stalls sell identical bowls and belly-dancing outfits. Here, the small shops have counters that open onto the streets displaying wares for residents, not tourists: fresh fish and meat, household goods, herbs and spices.
Wandering aimlessly we stumble on the old Jewish cemetery, where the Hebrew inscriptions on the worn tombs are still legible. Nearby is a blue-tiled synagogue where a few old men chat quietly. The welcome calm makes us reluctant to head back to the medina. Instead, we wind our way through narrow alleys back towards the place where our journey began – the Place des Ferblantiers, where the El Abdi family sells their doors.
As the sun heads for the horizon, this quiet square offers a peaceful alternative to the raucous evening entertainment at Jamaa el Fna, the city’s main square.
Here, craftsmen are using the last of the light to finish making and repairing tin lanterns, just as their forebears have for centuries. Families are pausing at the end of a busy day – men chatting to each other, women likewise, keeping one eye on their children as they play in the square.
Fronting the square is Kosybar, a welcoming three-storey bar-and-dining complex. We scale the stairs to the roof terrace, where a welcome breeze takes the sting out of the still-warm sun.
As we nibble on olives and down our cool drinks, we watch the storks that nest on the walls of the nearby El Badi Palace and thank our new friend Abdel for encouraging us to explore another side to Marrakech.
The writer was a guest of La Mamounia.
WA TODAY.com.au
