Part 3 of 3
Souk el Khemis doesn't have aisles so much as gaps between piles. Punched-metal lanterns hang low, strung three and four to a chain, and every wall behind them is stacked floor to ceiling, carved chests, gilt-framed mirrors, brass trays, terracotta jars taller than a person.
You don't browse it so much as excavate it, stall by stall.
Four pieces made it out and into my suitcase:
Two kilim poufs
Textured, low, built to take a scuff, the sort of decor that looks better after a year of actual use than they do new.
A red flatweave rug
Hand-embroidered. Wool on wool, the kind of piece where you can feel where one dye lot ran out and the next began.
From the co-op, a Silver Berber pendant
The freedom-symbol cross shape you see on jewelry across the Amazigh regions of North Africa, found hanging off a chain of carved wooden balls, tangled in with strings of beads in every color a market stall can hold.
Three carved wood wall panels
Pulled from the same stall's back corner, where African masks and figures stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall. Each panel is a different scene, a moon on one, a round two-eyed face on another, geometric checkerboard and triangle carving running through the third. The vendor said they'd come north from Burkina Faso, plank-style carvings in the tradition of Bwa masking. We can't vouch for provenance beyond his word, but the carving itself, deep, confident, no two panels repeating a motif, is the real thing regardless of where exactly it was cut.
Souk el Khemis
A hand-embroidered flatweave doesn't sit right in just any room, and the wood panels need a wall with enough restraint around them to let the carving read. That's most of what sourcing trips like this one are, buying pieces you're confident about before you know which room they're going in, and trusting that the right room will turn up once they've cleared customs.
I'll be back for this next: Cedar, Zellige, Stucco: A Marrakesh Architecture Crawl.
