Moroccan Keepsakes

Morocco, December 1981

                                            

Introduction

In December 1981, three friends and I — all then living in Lisbon, Portugal — flew to Tangier, Morocco, and rented a small Fiat for a ten-day journey south by southeast into the Sahara. Our intention was to spend Christmas in Nativity-like environs.

From Tangier we took well maintained roadways to the foothills of the Rif Mountains and the small city of Chaouen. From there we drove onward to the ancient city of Fez, then to the desert towns of Erfoud and Rissani.

Several of the objects I collected during this trip remain in my possession, reminding me of the true value of that seminal experience.

The first quarter of the trip unfolded largely without incident along open roads bordered by stoney but sparsely-forested plains and scattered villages. While there were long stretches of conversations punctuated by stops at roadside cafés, our group had moments of mechanical uncertainty with the car and the strange exhilaration that accompanies travel just beyond the edge of a plan.

By the time we exited Fez heading southeast, the landscape turned treeless and rocky, and our ultimate ambition began to seem even more reckless: Our crazy plan was to travel to the distant outpost of Rissani and then follow a desert truck track near the Algerian frontier, eventually slipping briefly into Algeria to experience the vast Sahara from the other side of an unmarked border, and then to quietly return to Morocco.

Along the way, Morocco offered its own presents — an incense tagine, a brass container and a Quranic tablet — the modest keepsakes gathered almost casually but carried home with disproportionate emotional weight.

Looking back now, I'd suggest these objects feel less like souvenirs than fragments of that journey's learning: vessels filled with memories tied to particular moments on the road into the world's most extensive desert.

Object I — Miniature Incense Tagine from Chaouen

I purchased this miniature incense tagine in a small shop in Chaouen, the blue mountain town in the Rif foothills. Unlike the typical large clay tagines used for cooking, this version was meant for incense — bakhoor, amber resin, or perfumed woods placed inside and gently heated beneath the conical lid.

At the time, Chaouen already felt dreamlike: steep lanes, whitewashed walls tinted blue in places, thin mountain air, and drifting wood smoke in the December cold. Yet my own memory of the town is inseparable from two experiences. The first was being guided into an open public parking area by a group of teenage boys who showed obvious disappointment when they weren’t compensated for their ‘effort.’ I didn’t realise how serious they were about their job until we returned to our car the next day and discovered all four tires were flat.

My second memory is even less pleasant. A day or two after arriving in Chaouen, I was suddenly overcome with food poisoning and spent much of the rest of our stay there confined to the guesthouse while my companions disappeared into the surrounding mountains on an overnight trek.

The pictured incense tagine became associated with that strange mixture of isolation and discomfort that accompanies sickness while traveling. I remember the muffled sounds from the street below, the cold mountain evenings, and the scent of unfamiliar spices and smoke drifting through the room's window from the central medina air. This simple object now carries less the image of Chaouen as a leg on the high road to adventure than of my own fragility.

Object II — Brass Container from Fez

I bought the pictured small brass container in Fez, where the journey entered a different rhythm entirely. After the openness of the Rif mountain roads, Fez felt enclosed, with urban density, and in the old quarter, a medieval intensity. The medina seemed to function as a self-contained world of workshops, narrow passageways, braying animals, smoke, tools, and voices echoing between stone walls.

Metalworkers hammered brass in dim stalls while spice merchants, leather sellers, and woodcarvers worked nearby. Everywhere there were repeating geometric patterns — in tiles, gates, trays, and engraved vessels like this one. The container’s ornament reflects that visual language of symmetry and repetition that defines so much of Moroccan craft tradition.

The container’s exact purpose is uncertain. Such things might have held spices, tea, incense, or ceremonial powders. What mattered to me was less utility than presence: the object seemed to condense the ancient atmosphere of Fez into something portable.

Compared with goods from the rough improvisational quality of desert markets farther south, the brass vessel suggested continuity and inherited craft. It felt deliberate, patient, shaped by generations of technique rather than by the transient economies of frontier trade.

Object III — Quranic Tablet from Erfoud

I acquired this weathered Quranic tablet in the market at Erfoud, a town near the edge of the Sahara. By the time we reached the town, the landscape had changed dramatically. The roads stretched through vast open terrain broken by occasional oases, camels grazing, and occasional settlements that seemed suspended between permanence and disappearance.

Even now nearly 45 years later, I recall how we visited a local hot bath on our first night in town, and while its mineral heat might have felt restorative after long hours on the road, the main sense I have now is that the ‘spa’ was dark and intimidating, with less than friendly faces popping up in the pool’s hot mist.

More pleasant is remembering how our squad wandered through Erfoud’s remarkable market. To our surprise, trilobites, ammonites, minerals, carved stone, and desert curiosities crowded the stalls. Camels stood tethered nearby while traders negotiated beneath awnings.

The tablet I took away immediately stood apart from the surrounding objects. Its hardwood surface was smoke-darkened and worn, bordered with stylized Arabic calligraphy surrounding a central hanging lamp or chandelier motif against a lattice-like background. The reverse side carried faded handwritten lines in ink — perhaps notes, prayers, or fragments of practice calligraphy. It felt neither wholly decorative nor wholly devotional, but something in between.

What attracted me most was its ambiguity. The object seemed to possess a prior life before entering the market economy of Erfoud. Unlike a polished souvenir, it carried visible traces of use, age, and spirituality.

A day or two after the market visit, outside tiny stucco’d Rissani on Christmas Day, with a local guide we managed to identify a truck track into the desert, hoping to follow that into Algeria. Instead, several miles out of town, the Fiat sank into a sandy sinkhole and became hopelessly stuck. What followed was equal parts frustration and hilarity as we struggled to push the car to safety in the immense silence of the Sahara. In an hour or so, and with the help of several truckers, we got the car back onto a hard surface. Today, that effort seems inseparable from the religious tablet: desert dust, exhaustion, risk, and a glorious recovery process bound together.

Closing Note

Together, the incense tagine, the brass container, and the devotional tablet form a small personal exhibition of Morocco from December 1981. They’re modest objects, to be sure, yet each preserves something larger than itself: the smells and stillness of Chaouen, the disciplined craft world of Fez, and the ethereal atmosphere of Erfoud, Rissani and the Sahara beyond.

What remains strong after all these years is not simply the journey’s route but its feeling — that illness in a cold mountain town, driving the seemingly endless desert roads, the crazy intention of slipping into the neighbouring country just for the sake of adventure.

The greatest present from the trip was ultimately the Sahara itself: reached by road on Christmas Day after a week moving steadily southeast through Morocco, carrying us toward a mostly empty landscape that felt at once overwhelming, inspiring and unreal.