I attended a fascinating presentation today, sponsored by the Middle East Institute and the Tangier American Legation Museum Society, on the state of efforts to preserve the old city, or medina, in Tangier.  Hanae Bekkari, vice president of the Tangier Medina Foundation and a prominent Moroccan architect, described the history of the city and the Foundation's preservation efforts.  She delivered the talk in English, and then took questions through an interpreter, to which she responded in French.

Among the Foundation's more remarkable projects is a women's literacy project, which in addition to teaching women to read and write Arabic, administers a microcredit fund which lends money to the women in order to promote independent enterprise.  One goal of the project is to help preserve the medina, which is now largely inhabited by low income families from rural areas, by raising the income of the families who live there.  A higher level of prosperity will allow both the tenants and the landlords to invest more in the preservation of the old buildings. The Foundation sees this approach as preferable to the gentrification which has overtaken similar historic areas in other cities.

Tangier, owing to its history as a crossroads between Europe and North Africa, is an architectural layer cake.  It still retains its original Roman layout, a city divided by two main thoroughfares at the center of which lies the forum.  The Roman forum has successively been the site of a Roman temple, a Christian cathedral, and a mosque, which until lately had fallen into ruin but which has been restored under the new King of Morocco.  The buildings themselves reflect the successive destruction and rebuilding that has accompanied successive invastions by the Romans, the Arabs, the Portuguese, and the English, and in this respect differ from the largely intact architecture of the great Moroccan imperial cities of Fez and Marrakesh, whose Islamic architecture has been preserved intact for many centuries.

10:52:05 PM    

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