The warmth of winter

In Fez winter is a season, not a parenthesis. More than twice as much rain falls there as in Marrakech, and the cold is not dry, but damp, and it comes in through walls of stone and earth, slowly, until it settles. The natural coolness that makes the house gentle in July becomes, in January, a problem to be solved.

Tradition solved it, and not by heating the air. It did three things, in this order: it clothed bodies, it heated matter, and it gathered people around a single fire.

Clothing before heating

The first answer to cold is not an appliance, but dress. The ample, layerable volumes of Maghrebi clothing are not an aesthetic choice — they trap layers of air, exactly as a thick wall does. The Al-Farwa, the hooded wool cloak each man wears in the colour of his guild, is not a winter ornament, but a thermal device one puts on one's shoulders.

Wool does work here that nothing synthetic can do: it regulates humidity. It absorbs up to a third of its own weight without feeling wet, then gives it back. In a damp winter that is the property that counts — more than insulating power itself.

Mass rather than air

Heating the air of a high room is wasted labour: warm air rises, presses against the ceiling and leaves by the first opening. Heating matter is another thing. A wall, a bench, a floor that have stored heat give it back slowly, by radiation, for hours — and the body receives it directly, without the air as intermediary.

The house already knows this principle: it is that of the hammam, whose inner room is heated from below by a hearth the bather never sees — the farnatchi — and whose paving and marble benches are nothing other than masses charged with heat. Rome called it the hypocaust. The hammam is its direct heir, without interruption.

The accumulation stove

The same principle exists as a piece of furniture, and it comes from the north. In 1767 the Swedish crown, facing a shortage of firewood, commissioned a stove that would give more heat while burning less: the kakelugn, a tiny firebox inside an enormous ceramic mass, threaded with flues in which the smoke winds at length before leaving, surrendering its heat to the material. The Alpine countries made it the heart of the Stube, the panelled room where winter is lived, with its masonry bench set against the stove.

That bench has cousins the house knows well: the sedari that run along the walls of every Moroccan salon, and the Persian korsi — a low table set over a brazier, covered with quilts, under which one slides one's legs. Three traditions, one idea: you do not heat a room, you heat the place where people sit.

Such a stove is charged once, in the evening. An hour of brisk fire, then the damper is closed: the fire goes out, and the mass radiates until morning. That displacement is the whole point — the heat stays when the fire is gone.

The fireplace, and where it comes from

There will also be fire that one watches: at least two fireplaces in the Riad, one to each winter salon, and two more in the Munya.

About these one must be exact. This page has just brought a stove from Sweden; it would be dishonest to pass this one off as an inheritance. The wall fireplace, with its hood and its flue, is not a device of the Moroccan house. The archaeology of the Andalusi house finds no flues in the living rooms: the hearth there is the kitchen's, and men warmed themselves at the earthenware brazier carried from room to room — the kanun, the mijmar. The hooded fireplace was born in the Latin West, in France, at the end of the tenth century, and reached the East by contact: in the Ottoman world it appears only in the last quarter of the fourteenth.

We are putting them in all the same, and we say so. A house where men spend the winter together needs a fire they can see: it is around that one that they sit up late, listen, and fall silent together without the silence weighing. The stove heats well and is not watched; the fireplace heats badly — most of its warmth goes up the flue — and gathers. They are two different trades, and one does not ask of the one what one asks of the other.

What belongs here is the hand. The hearth opens under a horseshoe arch some ninety centimetres wide, jambs and fireback in firebrick, with a green-and-white zellige dado carried round the opening. Above it the carved gebs hood rises, tapering, to the cedar ceiling, worked in a sober interlace and limewashed. The hearth floor is raised some twenty centimetres on a slab of grey stone wide enough to sit on sideways; the andirons and the poker come out of the house's own forge. No mantelshelf and nothing set on top: a fireplace is not a shelf.

The house does not hide what it has borrowed. The stove comes from Sweden, the fireplace from the Latin West, the korsi from Persia; the bench and the brazier are from here. One takes what works and has it made by the hands of the medina — which is what Fez has always done, and is the opposite of a reconstruction.

Fire does not sleep beside men

From that property follows the one absolute rule of the house in matters of heating: nothing burns in a room where anyone sleeps. No brazier, no stove alight, no flame of any kind. In Morocco carbon monoxide kills every winter, and it kills in exactly this way: combustion in a closed room, sleepers who do not wake.

The accumulation stove is the answer to that rule and not its exception: it is charged in the evening, in front of everyone, and it is out well before the house falls asleep. Live fire has its place — one only, in the salon, where men are awake and in company.

Two kinds of warmth, two places

The house is therefore heated in two ways, and the line between them is the line of sleep.

Where men gather — the salon, the workshops, the refectory — a masonry accumulation stove, clad in the zellige the ṣāniʿ cut and the plaster the neighbouring workshop carves. It is charged in the evening, one sits against it, it radiates until morning. It is an object, and it is made to be looked at. In the two winter salons the fireplace is added to it: one gives the heat, the other gathers the evening.

Where men sleep, and on every upper floor, nothing is seen: coils buried in the render of one wall, fed with warm water from the hammam's furnace — the fire that already burns every day and whose heat, until now, was lost. One hearth, one flue, one man tending it, and the warmth travelling to the rooms.

The warm wall does something else along the way that nothing else would do: it stays dry. In Fez, damp in the walls does more harm than cold.

The wood comes from the workshop

The furnaces of the hammams of Fez have always burned what the city discards: joinery offcuts, sawdust, pressed olive pomace. Nothing is bought there that can be recovered.

The house stands in the same position, except that it produces its own offcuts. The wood workshop works cedar all year; its shavings and cuttings feed the furnace that warms the workshop. It is a ring that closes without anyone having had to draw it.

The verse speaks not of a sacred fire but of the ordinary one, the fire lit in the evening. It says two things of it: that it reminds, and that it serves. That is exactly what is asked of it here.