Last weekend saw the opening of the 17th edition of Caftan, one of the most prestigious events in the traditional Moroccan haute couture scene. It is all over in only a couple of hours, but the work behind the glitz and glamour has taken months.

There is tremendous competition even before a single caftan glides down the catwalk. Only fifteen fashion designers are selected from the more than 50 who submitted their portfolios to the organizers. Once chosen, the designers have only four months to prepare a collection of eight caftans. Then comes the tension of waiting to see how the critics react to the new designs.

Top fashion designer Meriyem Boussikouk from Casablanca (pictured left) has 20 years of experience in the industry. Yet she said she was still nervous about how the public would react to her new collection. “We have been nervous since we started preparing for the show, and our nerves grow as the event gets nearer, because we are not sure about ourselves 100 percent. There are new creations as well as new ideas we want to propose to the public, and we are not sure about the reaction (it’ll get). Will the public accept or reject what we offer?”

The theme chosen by this year’s event organizers, a Fashion magazine called FDM, or Femmes du Maroc, was “Women of Legend”. The designers were to be inspired by a variety of women who made history for a variety of reasons, such as Audrey Hepburn, Umm Kulthum, Cleopatra, Coco Chanel and Marilyn Monroe among others.

Khalid Bazizd, the show’s producer, said the goal was to pay tribute to these fascinating women who seemed to have had everything: beauty, power, talent, knowledge and glory. “We chose the theme of ‘Women of Legend’ because it inspires fashion designers. These women have always been full women (the embodiment of womanhood). In the Moroccan history, we took Kahina. We also chose Umm Kulthum, Marilyn Monroe and other women. The most important thing is that women are not there just to complement men. At the same time, we revisited the history of Morocco as well as the world’s history to put women up front. What can you find more beautiful than a caftan to showcase women?”

Designer Dany Atrache

Each edition of Caftan has a guest of honor, and this year it was the turn of the French-Lebanese designer Dany Atrache. “I came to Morocco to learn how Moroccans work on this traditional garment, because there is a lot of work involved in it and also it is made in a special way,” said Atrache. “We cannot call it a designer piece, because a designer piece is linked to fashion that changes every six months. Here, we are talking of a traditional garment that is centuries old, yet it looks as new. It is not easy to reach this level of perfection,” he added.

The audience was entertained by colourful dance sequences inspired by Coco Chanel, Marie Antoinette and Marilyn Monroe. The Choreographer was Moroccan Malika Zaidi. “I will show off all these women through choreography and acting. What strikes me most is the beauty. For me, all women are beautiful regardless of their shape. They could be tall, short or fat – they are always beautiful”.

First published on The View From Fez

  A this time of year the scent of Fez is the scent of orange blossom, writes Derek Workman.

Today was hot, with crystal air and bright blue sky; one of the best days Fez has seen for a while. A week or so ago the air began to fill with the scent of zhar; the heady aroma of orange blossom. Young boys, and occasionally their sisters and mothers, take to the streets with poles to belt the orange trees and shake loose their snow fall of dainty white blossom.

Gathered in baskets, it is taken to the vendors in the Medina, and for the next couple of weeks the air will be rich with the pungent bouquet, as housewives swoop down to buy the basic ingredient of a scent and flavouring that permeates Moroccan culture. Taste a Moroccan pastry, and there is a fair chance that a dribble of orange blossom water has been added to the mix; visit a hammam, and the rich soaps and ungents might release a light perfume of orange; go to a celebration, particularly a wedding, and you will have your hands sprinkled with the water as a sign of welcome and good luck.

  photo credit Sandy McCutcheon

Orange blossom water is big commercial business, but many households still prepare their own – and it’s a family affair. I’ve been invited to the Medina home of Michelle Reeves, where her mother-in-law, Mama Fatima Abdelmoula, is preparing the delicate brew, as she has done every year for the last forty-three years, since a neighbour taught her as a girl of fourteen.

We exchange salaams as I’m introduced to Mama Fatima, Fatima Chafik, Michelle’s girl Friday, and Khadija, Michelle’s daughter. Introductions aside, coffee, and mint tea are prepared, and a plate of wonderful pastries is produced, bought from a local bakery. Parts of a copper still, a katara, are waiting to be assembled, but there is the process of mixing the orange blossom to be gone through first. I take a bite of a brioche, a mouthful of coffee, and watch.

Michelle bought the blossom four days earlier, and it has been wrapped in layers of cotton since then, drying enough to remove excess moisture, but not enough to deplete the aromatic essence. I’m staying at a riad with an orange tree in the centre of the patio, and when I wake up each morning the scent drifts into my room. The morning is said to be the best time to buy the blossom, before the heat of the day has had a chance to drain the heady perfume away. I pick a small flower, and when I crush it between my palms the scent isn’t as intense as I expect it to be, so it seems that the blossom has to mature to the point of falling from the trees before it has enough essence for the distillation process to work.

 A large copper still for orange blossom or rose distilling

The first step is to check the burner, heated from a gas bottle and hired along with the katara, the still. Rachida, nanny to Khadija and her baby sister Olivia, waves a cigarette lighter around the connection, and a small flame flares out from the connection of the plastic orange tube to the burner. The gas bottle supplier is sent for, appearing within a few minutes, and yes, he definitely agrees that it’s best not to continue until the escape is sorted out. From the bulbous pockets of his jacket he pulls out a spanner and undoes the connector, trims the end of the orange tube, and then finds that the screw clip that tightens tube to burner is broken and won’t tighten, hence the gas escape, and a new one of the correct size is the last thing he thought to bring. Could Fatima please nip down to his shop and get another one? She’s back in a couple of minutes, new connection made, and all is working wonderfully, and, as the kettle has just been boiled and the mint tea is ready to be poured he is invited to stay. The polite dialogue of, “I have to go,” “But you must have a glass of tea and a bun,” “Oh, alright then, if you insist,” is gone through and he is served a glass of mint tea and a splendid pastry dribbled in chocolate.

Mama Fatima begins the mix. Two kilos of orange blossom will provide about five litres of perfumed water. The still is in three parts; the bottom one contains the water for the distillation, the second one the mix, and the third one is a container of cold water which has to be continually changed to create the steam that is part of the distillation process.

Orange blossoms on sale in the Saghra souk

A thick layer of blossom is laid in the middle section of the katara, on top of it is placed an orange, which is then covered over with more blossom. The bottom section is filled with water, a few big handfuls of blossom, a couple of oranges and the peel of a lemon. This increases the intensity of the perfume as the liquid passes through the distillation process.

When Michelle told me about gathering the orange blossom I was confused. If they remove the blossom, how does the fruit grow? (I remember being told by an orange grower in Spain that the orange is the only tree that can bear blossom and fruit at the same time.) Apparently, the tree bears little fruit anyway, and you would be very unwise to eat it. It’s a bitter fruit, commonly known as a Seville orange, (wonderful in marmalade), and even though it has been the main tree found in Arab gardens for millennia, it was only ever used to provide decoration and flavourings for food and cosmetics. It is only marginally less tear-making than sucking on a lemon.

I’m chewing my second bun when the water container is put on the burner, the middle section with the majority of the blossom set in the tight- fitting flange of the base, and the cold water section placed on top. Mama Fatima asks for salt, and takes a handful from the container Fatima two hands her. “Part of the recipe,” I think, and then realise I’ve jumped the gun a bit as she scatters it in a circle around the base of the burner. “To keep Satan away,” she explains with a grin.

Fatima junior brings in two plastic kitchen bowls, which seem slightly out of keeping with the burnished copper of the still and abolishing the devil. In one is a murky, glutinous liquid and in the other are a pile of grubby strips of cloth. The sludge is argile, a green clay from the Middle Atlas Mountains, and known for its rejuvenation properties, which is why it is used in face packs. On this occasion it is being spread on the cloth strips before being wound around the joints of the three sections of the katara, and when it dries it will form a seal to stop the steam escaping. It seems that it is an excellent glue for the purpose, which sets me to think that when used as a face pack and sets, removing it quite literally peals away the years.

The tank begins to boil and Mama Fatima patches the odd seam in the cloths to prevent the luxurious essence escaping. The room begins to hint of the aroma of oranges. Mama and gas bottle man agree that all the seals are working to perfection, gas and steam, so he leaves. Surprisingly quickly, a fine stream of liquid begins to appear from the spout on the top section, and Mama Fatima carefully positions a five litre plastic water bottle under the dribble. Marginally quicker that watching paint dry, I see the bottle slowly filling with liquid as the perfume hangs thicker in the air. The plastic bottle begins to buckle and contract from the heat of the liquid, and Mama Fatima has to replace it with the smaller bottle that the orange blossom water will eventually be decanted into.

Every few minutes the top container has to be emptied, replacing the hot water with cold, to continue the distillation. You know when distillation is over because the perfume of oranges slowly fades. The bottles are filled and left for forty days to mature. I’d hoped to take a bottle back to England to celebrate the wedding of my son in three week’s time, but it looks as though I’ll have to buy a commercially produced bottle and cheat a little.

But they do say it’s the thought that counts.

I would like to thank Michelle Reeves of Plan-It Fez for her help with this article.

This post was first seen on The View From Fez

Derek Workman on the subtle art of carpet-weavers and dealers.

There are two ways people buy Moroccan carpets.

The first is to carefully mull. Will the colour clash with the furnishings in the living room? Will it get too much wear in the hall? Is that orangey one better value than the greeny one?

The second is to simply have the smiling vendor throw half a dozen down on the floor, take off your shoes and squish your toes in the pile to see which feels good.

I like the second way.

And don’t think the salesman is taking the mickey when he grins and says, ‘You only pay for the front, the back is free,’ because in the High Atlas Mountains, where some of the looser pile carpets come from, the shaggy side is for winter warmth while the smoother reverse is for summer wear. And speaking of wear, some rugs actually are worn as a winter wrap or used as bed covers.

In Morocco, every carpet tells a story – quite literally, although you may not be able to decipher its meaning. Each tribe has its own repertoire of imagery which differs by village and region, but there’s no such thing as a pattern or design. Every weave and weft is learned at the feet of a mother and grandmother – and a carpet weaver is always a woman.

The designs tell of grand ceremonies and minor happenings in the village, but the essence of a carpet is the story of the weaver, the rhythm of her daily life. Her trials and tribulations, her small joys and larger happinesses are woven into her carpet, as a painter puts his emotions on canvas by the subtlety of his brush.

Wander Marrakech’s higgledy-piggledy souks and you will find carpets everywhere; piled, rolled, unfolded and folded, spread on floors or cascading from hooks and balconies, casually thrown or elegantly presented like a perfect pearl in a Bond Street jewellers. Technicolor existed in the shades and subtleties of colour in Moroccan carpets long before the idea hit the silver screen. Subtle or screamingly outrageous – they’re all there.

But buying a carpet is a serious business, a special moment to be savoured, accompanied by mint tea sweetened with cardiac-arrest levels of sugar. ‘There is no need to rush, madam.’ ‘No hurry, no worry.’ ‘This price is special only to you so please don’t tell your friends.’ ‘If only I could to give you a better price, sir, but anything less and my children won’t eat today.’ ‘Do you have a credit card?’

You can read more from Derek on his site, Spain Uncovered.

I was reading the other day that when a group of school kids were questioned about where they thought milk came from, most of them had no idea it came from a cow. A fridge shelf in Tesco seemed to be the main suspect. While it may be easy to snigger at the ignorance of modern children of some of the basics of life, it occurred to me that there are plenty of things that we take for granted, totally unaware of the story behind them.

Take the beautiful babouches, the soft leather slippers we see in rows lining walls in tiny shops in the souk. When you bought a pair did you ever think about where they came from? Probably not, but they certainly didn’t just appear thanks to the babouche fairy. Admittedly some are now being mass produced, but others are still made by hand, and their story, and that of much of the beautiful artistry we take home as gifts and souvenirs, is intricately woven into the whole fabric of life in the Medina.

This point was brought to mind when I was taking a walk through the Medina with Abdellatif Benhrima. Born and bred there, he knows the maze of alleys like the back of his hand, and as we wandered through the streets behind the Musee de Marrakech, he suddenly ducked into a vaguely disreputable-looking foundouk, one of the antiquated courtyards that provided both accommodation and sales space for travelling merchants for hundreds of years. Some of these foundouks have been restored as riads, but equally as many still maintain their original function as small workshops and commercial premises. Unfortunately, while some have been kept in reasonable condition, others suffer badly from years of neglect. It was strange to compare the world I’d stepped into of freshly-dyed skins drying in the sun, mopeds and beat up old handcarts with the décor of Le Foundouk, the chi-chi restaurant of choice of the tantalisingly rich, almost next door.

We went into a workshop tucked in a corner, no more than about three metres by one-and-a-half, where a man in white skull cap and thick brown corduroy jacket against the cold was carefully applying a soft white leather covering to the thicker leather of a belt. This was where, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, Abdellatif had worked, making slippers, belts and soft leather bags, sharing the space with four others.

In the inevitable ceremony of welcoming a friend, Abdellatif and I were offered tea. (And here I was introduced to one of the finer points of the Moroccan tea ceremony; if you are offered a glass of tea you are welcome, if you are asked to sit, chat and watch the tea being made, you are very welcome, as it’s an opportunity to chat and while away a few minutes while the tea is brewing.) While Abdellatif and his friend, Mustapha, caught up with their news I picked up a soft, beautifully embroidered shoulder bag in warm, rose-pink lying on the makeshift sofa beside me. I could see it draped across the shoulder of my granddaughter, and her smile as she received it. The bag wasn’t quite finished, it needed a strap and fastenings, but I asked how much it was.

‘You are here to take tea,’ said Mustapha, ‘not to buy something.’

As the guest I was offered the first sip from the single glass in Mustapha’s workshop, and when we’d each had a drink and the pot was being topped up for a second round, he climbed on his bike and rode off into the souk in search a strap so my granddaughter’s gift could be finished. A few minutes later, an elderly gentleman in a white djellaba appeared at the doorway, enquiring about the belts Mustapha had been working on. After exchanging a few pleasantries with Abdellatif, he took them and went on his way. He was the buckle man, who would punch the holes in the belt and fix the buckles. He would bring the rough leather belts to Mustapha for covering, and either sell the finished product himself or pass them on to someone else who had ordered them.

And that’s when the interconnectedness of the Medina struck home to me. 

Mustapha would decide on the products he would make that week, whether to order or for him to sell direct to a shop. He would buy the few skins sufficient for his needs from the daily auction in the leather market and would then dye them himself and dry them in the courtyard of the foundouk or hand them over to someone to dye to his choice of colour. When the skins were prepared he would cut them to the pattern of the model he was making that week and then hand them to a woman who did the painstaking embroidery at home, as a way to supplement family income. When the pieces came back he would assemble them, then cycle to a cupboard-size shop to buy the silken cord that would make the shoulder strap, of exactly the right shade to match the dyed leather. He then covered the press stud fastenings in leather and fixed them in place. 

One day each week he would gather his bags, or belts, or slippers together, and perhaps those of his family made in other miniscule workshops, and take them to his customers in the souks. If one shop didn’t buy them, another would. He would buy his vegetables from the food market and bread from the bakery that form part of the five ‘hearts’ of the quartier, his meat from the local butcher with a whole lamb hanging from a hook, and his groceries from one of the dozens of narrow cavernous shops almost within an arms-reach of his home. Everything contained within the walls of the Medina, each having his role to play in the highly organised chaos of life within the rose-pink walls.

Abdellatif Benhrima is Our Man In Morocco

 You can read more of Derek Workman’s work at spainuncovered.net

Derek Workman’s gastronomic adventures are not for the faint of heart

Jmaa el Fna, North Africa’s most vibrant and exotic square, the ancient heart of Marrakech, where snake charmers, storytellers and acrobats entertain the passing crowds. By day it bustles with henna artists, potion sellers, fresh orange juice vendors and red-robed water sellers, but when dusk falls handcarts are wheeled into the square and unfolded in an intricate pattern to reveal portable grills, tables, benches, pots and pans, and the curling smoke of 100 barbeques spirals over the largest open-air restaurant in the world.

There are stalls to fit every taste and every pocket; a bowl of harira, a traditional rich tomato and lentil soup with beef or chicken, seasoned with ginger, pepper and cinnamon, or b’sarra, white bean soup with olive oil and garlic; add a sandwich served in a khobz, a small, round flat loaf with the top nipped off to form a pocket, filled with freshly deep-fried slivers of liver dribbled with a green chilli sauce, or a handful of merguez sausages, and you’ll be set up for a stroll around the souks – although you may want to leave the tajine of sheep’s or calf’s feet and the sliced camel’s head to the locals to enjoy, and it would take a certain amount of culinary fortitude to sample a bowl of sheep’s testicles.

While the mounds of food are prepared, young men in long white coats work the crowds trying to convince passers-by that the succulent dishes served at their stall are best; “Delia Smith created our menu”, “All our fish comes fresh from Sainsbury’s”. And any supermarket would be proud of the fish the stalls serve, dipped in flour and seasoned with salt and saffron before being deep-fried until crisp and golden.

On the west side of the square, a row of white-capped chefs steam mounds of snails in battered enamel bowls. The menu is simple – snails or snails, but as the little gastropods served in a tantalising broth are a gastronomic institution in Morocco, it isn’t always easy to get a seat at these stalls. Wonderful for the digestion, locals drain the broth after having their fill.

The beautiful chaos of the food stalls is entertainment in its own right, but when you have eaten there’s still the raucous street entertainment of Jmaa el Fna to keep you from your bed.

You can read more from Derek on his site, Spain Uncovered.

This post first appeared on Herb Lester Associates

The almost lost art at the heart of the beautiful game, uncovered by Derek Workman

Kamal Boukentar spends his days hand-sewing footballs, sitting on a rush-seated chair outside his wardrobe-size workshop, La Clinique du Ballon, deep in the souks of Marrakech Medina. He painstakingly sews small panels of leather together with an exactness of stitch that makes you think it has been sewn by machine. Occasionally he stops to spray the seam he is working on with water, to soften the leather and make it easier to sew. He is the only handmade leather football-maker in Morocco, and, quite possibly, one of only a handful left in Africa and Europe.

When we first meet, Kamal is working on a model from the 1930s with 18 panels. On a shelf in the shop window is the ultimate in the fine art of football making, a ball of 72 pieces, probably one of only two in the world, one made by Kamal, the other laboriously sewn by his father 40 years earlier.

“Mohamed Boukentar, my father, started the shop in 1965, and was one of about 20 makers in the Medina at the time. During the 1970s my mother, Lalla Aicha, worked with him, and is the only woman ever to have hand-sewn leather footballs in Morocco. I began in 1984, when I was 12, and it took me a week to make my first football.” He points to the ball in the window. “I can make an 18-piece football in one day, but that one took me 10 days of solid work. It’s purely for display, to show just how intricate a ball can be, and there is no price in the world that would get me to part with it.”

Most people probably just assume that a football is made from a basic design, which is exactly what I thought – which goes to show how most people, including me, are completely wrong. Most modern footballs are made up of 32 panels, but an original can be made up of 10 different numbers of pieces from four to 34, and each of those will have three or four different designs, around 30 different patterns in all.

As the ball comes together like a complicated inside-out puzzle, Kamal inserts the rubber bladder that inflates the finished ball. Fortunately, he doesn’t go as far as using a pig’s bladder as they would in the early days of the game. In its natural state, the leather is pale beige, but after three carefully rubbed-on coats of olive oil, it attains the rich brown colour and muted sheen of memories of games played by men with short haircuts and knee-length baggy shorts, who didn’t feel the need to kiss and cuddle each other whenever a goal was scored.

Despite being a sporting work of art, Kamal’s footballs are never likely to see a football pitch. “Most people buy them for decoration or as gifts. But I like it when an older man buys one because it reminds him of when he played football as a boy. I’ve got an original pair of 1930s boots on display and sometimes people tell me what it was like playing in them. Heavy and uncomfortable, by the sound of it!”

The post first appeared on the Herb Lester Associates website

You can read more from Derek on his site, Spain Uncovered.

 Seeing ghosts has never been a major preoccupation for me, but if ever I find myself frightened of phantoms I know exactly where to go – to the Spice Souk in Marrakech, where Ahmed will create a secret blend of dried chameleon, iguana foot, sea urchin, hedgehog and fish bones. I’ll grind them, throw them in fire and breathe in the cleansing fumes. 

Dried chameleon and hedgehog may be some of the more obscure ingredients on offer at the Berber pharmacies, but for whatever ails you they will have something to swallow, breathe, rub on or wash in. Too much stress and not sleeping? An infusion of nutmeg flower. Trouble with migraine or sinus? A few tiny black nejillia seeds wrapped in a cloth and inhaled after a quick rub on your palm will blow your head off, make your eyes water and instantly clear your head. It’s also great for snoring. 

Ahmed spots a shaving cut on my face and gives me a piece of alawn stone to rub on to aid quick healing. With a side-long glance he tells me that it also ‘creates new virgins’, a topic I prefer not to pursue. Continuing with the theme he suggests that should I ever need help in the ‘men’s department’ he’ll mix me a concoction of Moroccan ginseng tea with just a smidgen of Spanish fly, a tiny insect so toxic that they are sold in the most miniscule quantities imaginable, but even so, Ahmed assures me, ‘all the night gymnastic, by morning’s man’s dead’.

A visit to a Berber pharmacy is as much ceremony as shopping. With a grin they will offer you a glass of ‘Berber Whisky’ – mint tea – while they discuss what ails you, let you sample a little of this, smell a soupcon of that, before mixing your potion, overcharging you and then try to sell you something else. But it’s all part of the game.

When I first visited Ahmed almost ten years ago I bought three small blocks of concentrated ambergris, jasmine flower and musk, which still perfume my home and never seem to fade or reduce in size. But after setting fire to a piece of gourd and inhaling the smoke to try and cure a headache, the stench was so bad that I decided that perhaps modern-day pharmacy does have something to offer – and swallowed a paracetemol instead.

This post was first seen on Herblester.com

This is nothing to do with Morocco, but it made me smile anyway.

It’s seems that one of Australia’s richest men, Clive Palmer, a mining billionaire, has commissioned a Chinese state-owned company to build a 21st century version of the Titanic, that would be ready to set sail in 2016. The plan is for the vessel to be as similar as possible to the original Titanic in design and specifications, but with modern technology.

“It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st Century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems,” he said.

The original Titanic was the largest luxury ship in its time, and struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. It went down on 15 April 1912, leaving more than 1,500 people dead.

“It is going to be designed so it won’t sink,” he added, which I thought  was what the designers of the original one said, and look what happened to that!

Palmer made his announcement less than a year after the centenary celebrations of the sinking of first Titanic, and on the same day he revealed plans to contest the next federal election in Queensland. It might be just me being jaundiced, but it smacks as a Michael O’Leary/Ryanair sort of publicity stunt.

Derek Workman

When you walk through Jmaa el Fna on a regular basis you become accustomed to all the performers that give the square such a lively and special feeling; the snake charmers, gnawa musicians, the water carriers and girly-boy dancers who flash their eyes at you from behind tasselled scarves. At one time you could have included storytellers in that list, but, almost unacknowledged, they are dying out, and it seems that there is only one traditional storyteller left in la Place, and he doesn’t perform on a regular basis now.

I was at a book reading recently of The Last Storytellers by Richard Hamilton, and it saddened me to hear that without realising it Marrakech has all but lost a tradition going back almost a thousand years. And unfortunately, in these days of TV, DVD and pirate videos, once it’s gone we’ll never get it back.

Richard has worked with the BBC World Service as a broadcast journalist for fifteen years, and spent a year in Rabbat as their Moroccan correspondent. While he was there he travelled regularly to Marrakech and became so intrigued by the storytellers in Jmaa el Fna that he suggested to the BBC he did a programme on them. It was while he was recording the programme that he realised that within a very short space of time there would be no-one left to entertain the audiences with their fanciful tales. He kept returning to Marrakech over the next couple of years, searching in the Medina for the old storytellers, who were mostly dead or retired by then, so he could record their stories before they were lost for ever. The result was The Last Storytellers – Tales From the Heart of Morocco 

“Marrakech is the heart and lifeblood of Morocco’s storytelling tradition, and there have been storytellers gathering their audiences there for almost a thousand years. The stories from Marrakech are particularly rich because they are influenced by traditional Arabic stories from the Middle East, then there’s the Berber civilisation that has filtered down to these stories, and some of them have influences from sub-Saharan Africa, so I think that’s probably what makes them so rich.”

These tales would once have had a huge educational, religious and moral impact on their audiences, and they can often be understood on varying levels, but as much as anything they gave the listener a short break from the realities of life.

“These are really morality tales in which the underdog, the poor, the down-trodden beggar, succeeds against the evil, rich, scheming sultan, vizier or corrupt judge, and that was very important for the original audiences of these stories because they would be poor themselves, and in their own lives they wouldn’t have had any success or power or status. So I think that was their form of escapism, a bit like modern-day cinema where people go to dream, and this is what people gathered around a storyteller for.”

Unfortunately, we’re never going to be able hear the stories Richard Hamilton gathered from the storyteller’s mouth, but you can enjoy a wonderful selection of Moroccan fables in The Last Storytellers. Richard has kindly given us permission to re-print one of his tales.

The Birth of the Sahara

Told by

Ahmed Temiicha

     A long time ago, when the earth was very young, it was one huge garden covered in tall palm trees and perfumed jasmine, and the songs of nightingales flooded the landscape with their gently melodies. At this time, all men were loyal, trustworthy and honest. In fact, the word ‘lie’ did not even exist.

     But one day, someone told a lie. It was a very small lie and of no importance, but it was the end of man’s childhood and the age of innocence.

     So God summoned all the men on earth together and said to them, ‘Each time one of you lies, I shall throw a grain of sand onto the earth.’

     The men looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said to themselves, ‘A grain of sand? What difference will that make? You can hardly see a grain of sand.’

     And so lie after lie, little by little, the Sahara gradually came into existence, as God threw grains of sand onto the earth from the heavens above. But here and there the odd oasis can still be seen. These are the traces of the original garden, because not all men lie.

Following their withdrawal of flights from a number of Moroccan airports after their dispute about baggage handling costs last year, we’ve just heard the excellent news that Ryanair have confirmed that they are creating their first non-European bases in Fez and Marrakech, and say the new arrangements will begin in April.

This isn’t only good news for the tourist industry, but the new bases at Fez and Marrakech will see an investment of over $210m by the airline in Morocco.

The airline will base one plane at Fez and will now fly a total of 15 routes from the airport, including new routes to Lille, Nantes, Nimes and St Etienne. Two planes will be based at Marrakech as Ryanair adds seven new routes to bring its total from Marrakech to 22. The seven new routes are to Baden, Bergerac, Cuneo (Italy), Dole (France), Munich, Paris (Vatry) and Tours.

The airline also said it would start flying new routes from two other airports in the country. It will operate two services from Essaouira to Brussels and Marseille and three new routes from Rabat to Brussels, Paris and Marseille.