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Fez medina7/25/2023 Hamido was heading for Fez's narrowest alley, so narrow that the city's more corpulent inhabitants cannot squeeze through a place where, as he put it, 'the walls can kiss each other'. I think we crossed Talaa Kebira several times, but it might have been another street altogether. 'The rule in Fez,' said Hamido, my diminutive, bespectacled local guide, 'is never to take a straight line when there is an alternative.' So we zigzagged along some of the medina's 9,500 lanes, streets and alleys. At first sight, they seemed the same: both steep enough to roll me inexorably down towards the mosque and the city's physical and spiritual navel. Two streets lead down to the grand mosque: the Talaa Kebira and the Talaa Seghira (Big and Small Street). Fez remained the country's spiritual centre. It retained that status until a hundred years ago, when it was superseded by Rabat. The medina was begun in the 800s, but much of what I was looking at was laid out in the 13th and 14th centuries, when Fez replaced Marrakech as the Moroccan capital. Beneath me spread the patchwork of the medina: the word 'labyrinth' is overused, but it applies here. Beyond the city walls, the green hills of the Middle Atlas rose on either side of the valley. Over breakfast on the roof terrace of Riad Laaroussa, a 17th-century palace with large, comfortable rooms and extravagantly high ceilings, I could see the extent of the medina. But in spite of all this, changes are happening - slowly - and these are making it a more fun place to visit. In Fez, it has survived because that is just the way the locals want it foreigners are still a tiny minority. In many of Europe's best-preserved cities, such as Bruges, the past has become a commodity to be kept alive and sold to tourists. Such determination has shaped Fez, making it one of the last bastions of the medieval world. That's not to say there were no cars in Fez, but they were in the Ville Nouvelle, the new town that sits above the ancient city, and those people had made it a point of honour not to walk out of the gates to see the newfangled contraptions. Sixty years ago, the writer Paul Bowles met people here who had never seen a car. Fez is still the most intact, least modernised medina in the Arab world and one of the largest car-free urban spaces on the planet, but it's changing. The medina of Fez, like the music of the oud, is all about repetitions, with progress achieved through a gentle shifting of pattern, a fresh combination, a new note. Then I realised that with every riff, he changed the tune, his music winding its way hypnotically through the evening. I thought he was simply strumming the same strings, caught in his groove. Whatever the reason, I was only half listening as the man in the cream djellaba plucked his lute. It might even have been exhaustion after a long day in the souk and the hammam. I might have blamed it on the deceptive character of gris, a wine as pale as water but packing a punch. My slowness might have been due to the barley soup, quail pastry, lamb shank and other delicious dishes that had emerged from the kitchen. The oud player had been strumming for almost an hour in the cool, modernist dining room of the Riad Fès before I noticed what he was doing.
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