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The Mellah is the old Jewish quarter of Marrakech, tucked into the south-east of the medina beside the Kasbah, quieter and more residential than the streets around Jemaa el-Fna. Its draw is heritage: the vast late-nineteenth-century Bahia Palace on its northern edge, a working synagogue, an old walled cemetery, and the tinsmiths' square that opens the quarter to the west. It carries a distinct atmosphere — a layer of the city's history you don't meet elsewhere in Marrakech — and it sits close enough to the Kasbah's monuments to fold into a single day in the historic south. The pace is calm. The texture is domestic.
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Wikidata knows Gladiator was filmed in Morocco. It doesn’t know where.
Ouarzazate is the second most filmed place in the Middle East and North Africa, yet 25 of its 27 productions are recorded only in Wikipedia prose. We compared filming records worldwide and found that in the Arab world, Wikidata usually knows the country but not the place.
The earthen ksar that has played Rome, Jerusalem and Yunkai survives only because people keep rebuilding it. What cinema films as eternity is, wall by wall, a work of constant repair.
Aït Benhaddou is cinema's favourite image of the ancient past, from Gladiator to Game of Thrones. But its earthen walls last only as long as someone keeps repairing them, so the set for eternity is the freshest mud in Morocco.
Agrabah was going to be Baghdad. A war made it fictional — and then Disney built it back out of real places, from a tomb in Agra to a valley in Jordan that usually plays Mars.
The Sultan's palace where Princess Jasmine feels trapped has the silhouette of the Taj Mahal — which is not a palace at all, but a tomb. That is how Agrabah works. Disney's fairy-tale city was going to be Baghdad, until the Gulf War made the name impossible; the studio invented a place that could not be found on a map, then quietly rebuilt it out of real ones — Isfahan and Agra, Marrakesh and Mandalay, a Jordanian desert that has played both Arabia and Mars.
How one of North Africa's oldest writing traditions survived conquest, colonial classification and the loss of its readers — and why, for much of it, we still cannot say what the marks mean.
A flat rock in southern Morocco is covered in a script you can see is writing and still cannot read a word of. It belongs to the Amazigh — a visual language older in North Africa than the Arabic alphabet, carried onto skin and wool and silver, nearly erased, and now reassembled into an alphabet on ministry walls. This is the story of what survived, what didn't, and why almost everything we "know" these signs mean was added later.
A courtyard plan far older than Islam turned North African houses — and the medinas built from them — to face inward. Climate and religion only half-explain why, and what finally displaced the courtyard says the rest.
The blank walls and inward courtyards of Fez, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo are usually explained by heat or religion. Both are true; neither is the whole story. The clue is in what eventually pushed the courtyard out of the modern city.
Two imperial cities, one element in the ground — and the difference between a red city and an ochre one turns out to be half geology, half planning law.
Marrakech shows you the iron in its earth; Fez veils the same iron under lime. What makes each city relentlessly one colour, though, isn't the ground — it's what the twentieth century did to it.
