MEDERSA BEN YOUSSEF

One of Marrakech's most beautiful monuments, the Ben Youssef Medersa has long been considered the most sumptuous Koranic school in the Arab world. As you enter this large enclosure, through a door with heavy bronze wings, it's impossible not to be impressed. Founded in the ^mid-14th century by the Marinid sultan Abu El-Hassan, the Ben Youssef Medersa was little more than a small theological school. Around 1565, the Saadian prince Moulay Abdallah had it rebuilt and embellished, transforming what had been an unimportant edifice into a building whose fame would spread over the mountains and into neighboring countries. The capitals of the prayer room and the carved cedar lintel of the entrance door bear witness to the Saadian reconstruction of the medersa. At the end of the 1960s, the medersa was closed to the public and the faithful. It was not until 1982 that restoration work enabled travelers to discover this masterpiece of Moroccan art. Its Marinid and Andalusian-inspired architecture is revealed in all its majesty when the sun shines on this venerable place of study and prayer. The rooms are decorated in a harmonious blend of marble and cedar wood, stucco and mosaic. The entrance is via a narrow corridor of mosaics and beams. The inner courtyard is a vast, deep rectangle, paved with marble and adorned in the center with a large, extremely sober ablutions basin. On either side of the courtyard, two ambulatory galleries with massive pillars support carved cedar lintels. At the far end of the courtyard, in line with the entrance, the prayer room is protected from secular view by one of Morocco's most beautifully carved portals. Divided into three sections by two rows of slender columns, the prayer room is topped by a pyramid-shaped dome made of cedar wood. The mihrab is decorated with verses from the Koran, carved on plaster. On the first floor and first floor are the 132 rooms reserved for the medersa's students. It's a real labyrinth! At one time, the school had up to 900 students crammed into these small cells overlooking either the central courtyard or the seven interior patios. It's in these rooms that students live, study, sleep and eat. When you visit them, you can't help but be transported back in time and moved to find yourself so close to the intimacy of these students from another time and another universe.