After a delicious start to the day of pomegranate & homemade yoghurt, we decided to explore the other 'must see' museums.
Enroute we walked past interesting doorways tucked back into thick walls.
Maison Tishkiwin is a charming small museum, which was once the home of Bert Flint, a Dutch anthropologist who accrued an enormous collection of cultural artifacts from all over Morocco & it's neighbouring African countries & provinces. Bert died, but the collection lives on!
There was a lot to see & enjoy here, so I will just mention a few of the pieces I found particularly noteworthy. The above is from a cabinet full of extraordinary looking leather pieces. The green took me by surprise as it isn't a colour green I've seen in many ancient cultures adornment wear. This is from Tuareg & apparently, it is not acceptable for men to wear metals like gold or silver to adorn themselves with! But they wanted to look pretty too.....so they have this type of leather jewellery!!!!!
From one of the neighbouring lands comes this garment. This is an example of husband & wife teamwork! The women dye the fabric in indigo, which sadly, the colour is a bit faded here. The MEN embroider the designs on top.
Here's a close-up so that you can see how fine the stitching is!!!
It was a delightful, quirky place to wander around & we were so glad we had decided to go there.
The Dar Si Said Museum gets quite good reviews, but in my opinion it was no where near as interesting as the little Maison that we'd just been to. It did have a couple of interesting features though. These chairs belonged to the household of a Sultan who had 4 wives & 8 concubines. As you can imagine there were a lot of children, & clearly quite a few at baby stage at the same time! How to get them to nod off when they all start crying....put them in these little chairs & put them on a mechanism that resembles our fairground ferris wheels!!!!
Beautiful examples of local embroidery were also a treat, especially after having tried my hand at it the day before.
The experience made me appreciate the time & skill of the women who made them.
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