Morocco's Secret Jewel
Anyone who has ever seen the film thinks they know Casablanca. Sam at the piano in a smoke-filled Rick’s Café, Bogart and Bergman, lashings of intrigue, all set against the vibrant backdrop of wartime Morocco. There’s never been a finer film portrayal of the mysterious East. But that’s the strangest thing – Casablanca is city planned and built by the French. In its heyday – the ’forties, at the same time the film was released – it was arguably the grandest Art Deco city on earth. Anything in the Moorish style was shunned.
In recent years Europeans have made a beeline for Morocco, lured by the medinas of Marrakech, Mèknes and Fès. They rent rooms in the glorious riads, courtyard homes, or even buy them and embark on the renovation. Mention Casablanca and most foreigners greet you with a scowl, and yell: ‘It’s not the real thing!’
Casablanca was the last Moroccan city in which I ever expected to live. I looked over about seventy riads in Marrakech and half as many in Fès. It seemed that every day I searched the prices soared up and up. Whenever I made an offer on a place, a foreigner with far deeper pockets outbid me. Then one day I received a phone call out of the blue. It was the mother of an old school friend. She said she’d heard on the grapevine that I wanted to live in Morocco. Then she explained she owned a large old house on the western edge of Casablanca that she wanted to sell. It was called Dar Khalifa, which means ‘The Caliph’s House’.
Next day I flew south to Casablanca and toured the house. It was an amazing gem: courtyards and fountains, stables, gardens, and a labyrinth of rooms. I knew instantly that it was where I wanted my children to be raised. The owner realised that few foreigners would want to move to Casablanca. Beyond that, she understood that any Moroccan who bought the place would have instantly torn down the house and put up monstrous apartment blocks in its place. She loved it too much to let that happen, and sold it to me at a very reasonable price.
My love affair with Morocco began in my childhood. My father, who was an Afghan, had never been able to take us to his homeland. So he took my sisters and I to Morocco instead. With its tribal clans, mountain strongholds and fiercely proud people, the kingdom is strangely similar to Afghanistan. Living in London with two small children made me desperate to escape to a new life with abundant space and blazing sunlight. Morocco seemed like the most obvious destination. Remembering my old childhood journeys there, I knew my son and daughter would learn languages and be touched by vivid cultural colour.
Move to a new country and your learning curve is a steep one. From the moment of our arrival we found ourselves grappling with our new lives, often exasperated at how difficult it was to get the simplest things done. We had a pathetic understanding of how Morocco worked. I was ready to overcome language barriers, but nothing prepared me for the cultural ones. In line with the Islamic faith, all Moroccans believe in Jinns, spirits whom live in a world overlaid our own. The Caliph’s House had been empty for almost a decade. The guardians whom inherited with the house, believed – along with all the workmen and everyone else – that it was packed full with evil spirits. Before there could be any peace the spirits had to be exorcised. I was forced to spend a great deal of time and money tracking down a team of exorcists. Twenty-four of them arrived one morning, whooping and screeching. They sacrificed a goat in one courtyard, skinned it, and nailed up its gallbladder. Then they cut themselves with knives, drank their own blood, and baptized the place in fire. In the process they almost burnt the house down. The exorcism cost about £500. Judging by the effect it had on the community, it was the best five hundred pounds I think I’ve spent.
Eventually I hired a local architect with a fondness for fine Cuban cigars. He planned to build a central stairway, to make some arches and to enlarge a couple of rooms on the first floor. He insisted I paid him in advance. Once he had cashed my cheque, he spent a full year avoiding me. In the end I fired him and learned to seek out artisans myself. Working with them directly, with no middleman, was the only way to keep my head above water. I discovered that the best moualems, master craftsmen, talked very little, thought long term, and hardly ever bargained on the price.
My dream was to make use of the finest Moroccan crafts – zelij, geometric mosaics, handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and to prepare the walls with tadelakt, a kind of Venetian plaster made from marble dust and eggs. I wanted to construct a galleried library too, in cedar wood for my twelve thousand books, and to commission three large new fountains.
Gradually, we moved ahead, testing craftsmen before giving them more work. The greatest joy is that in a place like Casablanca you can let you’re your delusions run wild. Compared with Britain prices are within one’s means. A vast fountain with many thousands of hand-cut mosaics costs about £500, and the galleried library, in the very finest cedar was £6000 (the second quality would have cost half the price).
But the greatest discovery of all were Casablanca’s junk yards. Many of the fabulous Art Deco villas and apartment buildings are being torn down. It’s a great crime. The only upside is that the junk yards are stacked high with architectural salvage. Most of it was crafted in France between the wars. Cast iron roll-top baths are about £12 each, and sublime porcelain sinks a metre across are about £18. You can find painted floral toilets for £20, and carved cedar doorways are £40 and up.
For me, Casablanca is Morocco’s secret jewel. Villas and old Art Deco apartments are affordable (from about £70,000 for a villa, and from about £35,000 for a vintage apartment). The ocean is five minute’s drive; the restaurants, schools and shopping are excellent, and there are no tourists at all. The melodious confusion of Marraekch and Fès are three hours by train, and the wages of nannies and maids are a microscopic fraction of what they are in Europe. But best of all is that Casablanca offers one a contented life against a backdrop of faded grandeur, in a land where one’s fantasy can and does come true.
(Written for The Sunday Times, London)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2006
Ends
In recent years Europeans have made a beeline for Morocco, lured by the medinas of Marrakech, Mèknes and Fès. They rent rooms in the glorious riads, courtyard homes, or even buy them and embark on the renovation. Mention Casablanca and most foreigners greet you with a scowl, and yell: ‘It’s not the real thing!’
Casablanca was the last Moroccan city in which I ever expected to live. I looked over about seventy riads in Marrakech and half as many in Fès. It seemed that every day I searched the prices soared up and up. Whenever I made an offer on a place, a foreigner with far deeper pockets outbid me. Then one day I received a phone call out of the blue. It was the mother of an old school friend. She said she’d heard on the grapevine that I wanted to live in Morocco. Then she explained she owned a large old house on the western edge of Casablanca that she wanted to sell. It was called Dar Khalifa, which means ‘The Caliph’s House’.
Next day I flew south to Casablanca and toured the house. It was an amazing gem: courtyards and fountains, stables, gardens, and a labyrinth of rooms. I knew instantly that it was where I wanted my children to be raised. The owner realised that few foreigners would want to move to Casablanca. Beyond that, she understood that any Moroccan who bought the place would have instantly torn down the house and put up monstrous apartment blocks in its place. She loved it too much to let that happen, and sold it to me at a very reasonable price.
My love affair with Morocco began in my childhood. My father, who was an Afghan, had never been able to take us to his homeland. So he took my sisters and I to Morocco instead. With its tribal clans, mountain strongholds and fiercely proud people, the kingdom is strangely similar to Afghanistan. Living in London with two small children made me desperate to escape to a new life with abundant space and blazing sunlight. Morocco seemed like the most obvious destination. Remembering my old childhood journeys there, I knew my son and daughter would learn languages and be touched by vivid cultural colour.
Move to a new country and your learning curve is a steep one. From the moment of our arrival we found ourselves grappling with our new lives, often exasperated at how difficult it was to get the simplest things done. We had a pathetic understanding of how Morocco worked. I was ready to overcome language barriers, but nothing prepared me for the cultural ones. In line with the Islamic faith, all Moroccans believe in Jinns, spirits whom live in a world overlaid our own. The Caliph’s House had been empty for almost a decade. The guardians whom inherited with the house, believed – along with all the workmen and everyone else – that it was packed full with evil spirits. Before there could be any peace the spirits had to be exorcised. I was forced to spend a great deal of time and money tracking down a team of exorcists. Twenty-four of them arrived one morning, whooping and screeching. They sacrificed a goat in one courtyard, skinned it, and nailed up its gallbladder. Then they cut themselves with knives, drank their own blood, and baptized the place in fire. In the process they almost burnt the house down. The exorcism cost about £500. Judging by the effect it had on the community, it was the best five hundred pounds I think I’ve spent.
Eventually I hired a local architect with a fondness for fine Cuban cigars. He planned to build a central stairway, to make some arches and to enlarge a couple of rooms on the first floor. He insisted I paid him in advance. Once he had cashed my cheque, he spent a full year avoiding me. In the end I fired him and learned to seek out artisans myself. Working with them directly, with no middleman, was the only way to keep my head above water. I discovered that the best moualems, master craftsmen, talked very little, thought long term, and hardly ever bargained on the price.
My dream was to make use of the finest Moroccan crafts – zelij, geometric mosaics, handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and to prepare the walls with tadelakt, a kind of Venetian plaster made from marble dust and eggs. I wanted to construct a galleried library too, in cedar wood for my twelve thousand books, and to commission three large new fountains.
Gradually, we moved ahead, testing craftsmen before giving them more work. The greatest joy is that in a place like Casablanca you can let you’re your delusions run wild. Compared with Britain prices are within one’s means. A vast fountain with many thousands of hand-cut mosaics costs about £500, and the galleried library, in the very finest cedar was £6000 (the second quality would have cost half the price).
But the greatest discovery of all were Casablanca’s junk yards. Many of the fabulous Art Deco villas and apartment buildings are being torn down. It’s a great crime. The only upside is that the junk yards are stacked high with architectural salvage. Most of it was crafted in France between the wars. Cast iron roll-top baths are about £12 each, and sublime porcelain sinks a metre across are about £18. You can find painted floral toilets for £20, and carved cedar doorways are £40 and up.
For me, Casablanca is Morocco’s secret jewel. Villas and old Art Deco apartments are affordable (from about £70,000 for a villa, and from about £35,000 for a vintage apartment). The ocean is five minute’s drive; the restaurants, schools and shopping are excellent, and there are no tourists at all. The melodious confusion of Marraekch and Fès are three hours by train, and the wages of nannies and maids are a microscopic fraction of what they are in Europe. But best of all is that Casablanca offers one a contented life against a backdrop of faded grandeur, in a land where one’s fantasy can and does come true.
(Written for The Sunday Times, London)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2006
Ends
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