We drove in from Casablanca, three hours east on a flat motorway, and stopped at the edge of the medina because that is where the road stops. Fes el Bali does not take cars. You leave it against the wall, pick up your bag, and walk in through a gate into a city that has run on foot for twelve hundred years. There was no guide waiting and no plan beyond a pin dropped on a phone, and within ten minutes the pin and I had lost each other.
I had come looking for exactly this. I wanted somewhere that did not arrange itself for visitors, and Fez obliges. The lanes close over your head and fork without warning. People move fast and know where they are going, and I plainly did not, and for once that felt like the right way to be somewhere new. This is what travel is supposed to do to you. It is supposed to put you a little out of your depth and make you pay attention.
There was no guide and no real map, and the first hour was the most lost I have felt anywhere.
The medina is the thing you came for, not whatever is tucked away inside it. Some nine thousand lanes are folded into a bowl under the hills, and the whole of it still works as a market and a workshop at once. A shout of balak from behind means a loaded mule is coming through and there is no room to argue, so you press into a doorway and let it pass. Satellite dishes sit on roofs that are six hundred years old. We went in January, which I would do again: the light was low and clean, the crowds were thin, and the medina was simply a city getting through its winter, people in heavy coats buying cauliflowers and haggling over the price of socks. Fez is a working city before it is a sight, and after Marrakech that comes as a relief.
The food was the one thing I never really solved. I do not eat meat, and Fez is a meat town. The tagines arrive with lamb or chicken, the pastilla the city is famous for is built on pigeon, and the grills along the lanes run to skewers of kefta and liver. What kept me going was the food that was never aimed at me in the first place: bissara, a thick soup of dried split peas finished with olive oil and cumin, ladled out at a counter for a few dirham and eaten standing up before the medina was properly awake; maakouda, little fried potato cakes; vegetable couscous, which is a Friday thing; and bread carried warm from the neighbourhood oven. Mint tea comes with everything, green tea taken almost to syrup with sugar and poured from a height into a small glass.
The crafts are the other reason to come, and they are not staged. Each trade still keeps to its own quarter. At Place Seffarine the coppersmiths sit in their doorways and beat tea trays and kettles into shape, and the little square rings with it, a few steps from the gate of the al-Qarawiyyin library. I bought a brass kettle there, its body planished by hand, after the long back and forth that buying anything in Fez asks of you: the first price is never the price, the glass of tea is part of the pitch, and you are expected to walk off at least once before it is done. A few lanes away, in the carpenters' souk, the wood is cedar and fragrant thuya, and I left with a small box, its lid set by hand in a pale and dark geometry of inlay. Going without a guide meant no one was walking me to a cousin's shop for a cut of the sale, which is the real argument for finding your own way.
Everyone photographs the Chouara tannery, and it is worth seeing once, but be clear about what it is: a leather shop with a view. You find it by the smell, and by the sellers who steer you toward a free terrace. Someone hands you a sprig of mint for the stench, which genuinely helps and which, you work out later, was not free. From the roof you look down on a honeycomb of stone vats, men standing thigh-deep in dye, working the hides the way they have for centuries, and it is hard to look away. Then you go back down through the shop, where the price of the view is a hard sell on a jacket at something like ten times what it should cost. Leave ten or twenty dirham for the terrace, take your photographs, and do not feel bad about walking out with nothing.
The few doors you can walk through are worth the trouble of finding them. The Bou Inania and Al-Attarine medersas are small and quiet after the lanes, every surface inside them carved plaster, cedar and cut tile. The great mosque and university of al-Qarawiyyin, founded by tradition in 859 and often called the oldest still-running university in the world, is closed to you if you are not Muslim, but you can stand in the doorway and look down the long aisles of arches to the courtyard. That one glimpse is as close as Fez comes to the story people tell about it, that everything good is hidden behind a wall. Mostly it is not. Mostly it is out in the street.
We stayed three days and two nights, and I never did learn the map. On the last afternoon we walked up out of the walls to the Merenid tombs on the hillside for the long view back over the medina, every flat roof a lid on a courtyard, the call to prayer rising from all of it at once. I had spent three days slightly lost, never quite sure which way I was facing. That was the thing I had come for, and Fez hands it to you without making any effort at all.
