Morocco – Fez – Pottery

After showing us the amazing tile work on the gate, Rashid took us to see how it was created. This was the first of many opportunities we had to see artists at work, and those experiences were among my favorite things about Morocco.

At the start of the process, they have huge piles of clay that they mix with water to the right consistency. One man spends his days pounding and shaping them into square tiles, cutting them to a uniform size.

Each of these tiles will have excess bits trimmed. They dry in the sun, are fired, glazed in bright colors, and fired again.

After that, another craftsman cuts each tile into geometric shapes, using chisels and small hammers.

Still another one arranges them, colored side down, in mosaic patterns. They have to keep track of the pattern’s colors in their head, because once the tile is set in place, removing it will disturb the whole thing.

At the end, they pour fiberglass over the back of it to hold it in place. They used to do this with concrete, but fiberglass is stronger and lighter.

The end result is zellige tile mosaics like the ones we saw on the palace gate. The process is stunningly labor-intensive. Seeing this process put the gate into perspective. How many people-hours went into creating that astounding beauty? It’s like the stone masons who spent the lifetimes of generations building cathedrals in Europe. Challenging, back-breaking, and also transcendent work.

Other men were doing wheel work. We watched as one man, using a kick wheel, threw out a tagine with a perfectly fitted lid. Our guide told us that he had been doing this for thirty years, and did not need any measuring tools at all; his hands just know how the shapes fit together.

Further into the shop, men were decorating pottery with glazes and metal inlay. One guy was painting a stack of plates with the phrase “Yes sir, I can boogie,” in English. When I asked our guide what was up with that, he said it was a special order from a restaurant in Denmark.

And, at the end, a shop filled with treasures. We did a little of our Christmas shopping here, selecting hand-painted olive dishes and a tiled mirror to take back across the ocean. The shop was a panopticon, dizzying and dazzling.