Morocco Guide
Marrakesh
Museum of Moroccan Arts
Opening time: Daily except Tues 9am–12.15pm & 3–6.15pm
Price: 20dh
Address: Next left after the Maison Tiskiwin, north of the Mellah
Dar Si Said is a smaller version of the Bahia Palace, built for a brother of Bou Ahmed, who, though something of a simpleton, nonetheless gained the post of royal chamberlain. It's a pleasurable building, with beautiful pooled courtyards, scented with lemons, palms and flowers, and it houses an impressive Museum of Moroccan Arts.
The museum is particularly strong on its collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woodwork, some of it from the Glaoui kasbahs and most of it in cedarwood. Besides the furniture, there are Berber doors, window frames and wonderful painted ceilings. There are also (upstairs) a number of traditional wedding palanquins – once widely used for carrying the bride, veiled and hidden, to her new home. Today, such chairs are still made in the souks and used, albeit symbolically, to carry the bride from her womenfolk in one room to the groom's menfolk in the next room.
One of the museum's most important exhibits, originally from the Ben Youssef Medersa, and not always on display, is a marble basin, rectangular in shape and decorated along one side with what seem to be heraldic eagles and griffins. An inscription amid the floral decorations records its origin in tenth-century Cordoba, then the centre of the western Muslim world. Although most Islamic artwork eschews images of plants and animals in favour of abstract patterns, the Ummayad caliphs for whom it was constructed had few reservations about representational art. What is more surprising is that it was brought over to Morocco by the highly puritan Almoravid sultan Ali Ben Youssef and, placed in his mosque, was left untouched by the dynasty's equally iconoclastic successors, the Almohads.