Morocco Guide
Marrakesh
The Ben Youssef Medersa
Opening time: Daily: April– Sept 9am–7pm; Oct– March 9am–6pm
Price: 40dh, combined ticket with Marrakesh Museum and Almoravid Koubba 60dh
Just thirty metres north of the museum is the entrance to the Ben Youssef Medersa, a koranic school attached to the Ben Youssef Mosque, where students learned the Koran by rote.
Andalusian-influenced art dominates here. As with the slightly later Saadian Tombs, no surface is left undecorated, and the overall quality of its craftsmanship, whether in carved wood, stuccowork or zellij tilework, is startling. That this was possible in sixteenth-century Marrakesh, after a period in which the city was reduced to near ruin and the country to tribal anarchy, is remarkable. Revealingly, parts have exact parallels in the Alhambra Palace in Granada, and it seems likely that architects from Muslim Spain were employed in its construction.
The central courtyard, its carved cedarwood lintels weathered almost flat on the most exposed side, is unusually large. Along two sides run wide, sturdy, columned arcades, which were probably used to supplement the space for teaching in the neighbouring mosque. Above them are some of the windows of the dormitory quarters, which are reached by stairs from the entry vestibule, and from which you can get an interesting perspective – and attempt to fathom how over eight hundred students were once housed in the building. One room is furnished as it would have been when in use.
At its far end, the court opens onto a prayer hall, where the decoration, mellowed on the outside with the city's familiar pink tone, is at its best preserved and most elaborate. Notable here, as in the court's cedar carving, is a predominance of pine cone and palm motifs; around the mihrab (the horseshoe-arched prayer niche) they've been applied so as to give the frieze a highly three-dimensional appearance. This is rare in Moorish stuccowork, though the inscriptions themselves, picked out in the curling, vegetative arabesques, are quotations from the Koran, the most common being its opening invocation: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful".