Copper, and the noise it makes

What is dinanderie?

Dinanderie is the art of shaping and decorating copper and brass objects — trays, teapots, incense burners, basins — not by casting them in a mould, but by striking a sheet of metal, with a hammer, against a form until it takes on that form's volume. In Fez, in the lanes bordering Place Seffarine, this gesture doesn't merely accompany the work: the hammering — the concert of hammer blows you hear before you even spot a workshop — is the process itself, not a noise added on top of it.

The metal: copper and brass

The French word "dinanderie" first denoted, according to France's national dictionary and lexical resources centre (CNRTL), a set of yellow-copper utensils — plates, candlesticks, ewers — before it came to denote the workshop that made them. It derives from "dinandier" plus the suffix "-erie", first attested in 1389, and traces back to Dinant, a town in present-day Belgium where a hammered-copper industry developed in the Middle Ages and was exported across Europe. The word travelled further than the town that gave rise to it: in Morocco, it now covers work in red copper — softer, and easier to stretch under the hammer without splitting — and in brass, an alloy of copper and zinc that is harder, golden in tone, and holds the crispness of a chiselled decoration better. Maillechort, a silvered variant of brass, is sometimes added to imitate the shine of silverware without its cost. In Fez, these metals are worked even though none of them is mined locally: dinandiers, according to anthropologist Baptiste Buob's study of the trade, buy materials that are themselves imported. The choice of metal also depends on use: a piece meant for the kitchen — a plate, a basin — needs thicker copper, able to take heat without warping, while a tray or an incense burner, more decorative than utilitarian, can be worked from a thinner sheet, easier to chisel on the surface.

The gesture: a sheet hammered against a form

Shaping a piece of dinanderie starts with a flat sheet of metal. The dinandier sets it against a form — an anvil with a rounded profile, a wooden block, sometimes an improvised mould — then strikes it, blow after blow, following the contours of that form until the sheet takes on its volume: the body of a teapot, the raised rim of a tray, the flared bowl of an incense burner. Hammers of different sizes and profiles follow one another according to the stage — roughing out the volume, planishing the surface, then chiselling the decoration directly into the metal, the way a burin would. A large basin or cauldron calls for wider, heavier blows struck with both hands; a small incense burner or sugar box, by contrast, is worked with small, precise taps, almost with the tip of the hammer, so as not to distort an already-thin wall. None of this happens quietly: the noise filling Place Seffarine isn't a byproduct of the work, it is the work, made audible. A badly hammered piece shows it before it's even touched — an uneven surface or a blurred pattern gives away an interrupted or poorly controlled gesture.

The square: Seffarine, in the Fez medina

Place Seffarine occupies a corner of the Fez medina, south of the Qarawiyyin Mosque. Its name comes directly from its artisans rather than the other way round: dinandiers there were known as seffâra or saffârîn, and the corporate territory they occupied — Seffarine street or square — eventually took their name, according to Buob's study. The traveller Leo Africanus already noted the presence of coppersmiths on this square in the 16th century; they still work there today, under the same arcades, a few steps from the Qarawiyyin library, the Seffarine madrasa and the hammam of the same name. That continuity — one trade, in one place, across nearly five documented centuries — sets Place Seffarine apart from an ordinary souvenir market: it is a working territory, held by the same guild since before the city even knew the tea that later shaped much of its current output.

The Fez medina as a whole — Fes el-Bali and Fes Jdid — has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1981, and Place Seffarine features as one of its landmark sites. There is, separately, a more recent and much broader international recognition: in 2023, UNESCO inscribed on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity the "arts, skills and practices associated with engraving on metals (gold, silver and copper)", jointly nominated by ten countries including Morocco. The inscription's own text names neither Fez nor Place Seffarine, and it covers a related but distinct gesture: engraving, which cuts a pattern into a surface already shaped, rather than hammering, which gives the piece its form in the first place. The two gestures often follow one another on the same object — a piece is hammered before it is engraved — but only engraving carries a named UNESCO recognition to date; the hammering that shapes a piece at Seffarine is not part of it.

Who hammers today

The repertoire most readily associated with Moroccan dinanderie today — tea trays, teapots, sugar boxes — is more recent than it looks. According to Buob's study, summarised by anthropologist Constant Hamès in the Cahiers d'études africaines, "Moroccan dinanderie only took shape with the importation and spread of tea, which began around the 1870s, becoming widespread especially at the start of the twentieth century, practically at the dawn of the French protectorate." In other words, most of what a visitor associates with this trade today — the hammered-copper tea service — owes its form to a drink that arrived from elsewhere and to a habit that became common a century and a half ago, not to an immemorial craft whose origin would be lost in the city's earliest centuries.

Production has since been largely industrialised and split into separate tasks, a shift Buob documents in his 2009 study — published by the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, who present it as examining the trade's "economic, social, historical and technical dimensions", and the situation of artisans today caught between the heritage preservation of their output and an industrial, capitalist evolution that spreads the work across several pairs of hands. But certain stages resisted that fragmentation: "it [the dinandier's gesture] has been preserved in certain phases (chiselling, for instance) of the manufacturing chain," notes Hamès's review — chiselled decoration remaining one of the few moments where a single artisan still masters a piece from start to finish, rather than executing only one segment of it. It's that whole, unbroken gesture you can still hear at Place Seffarine.

Where to hear it

Dinanderie is not, at present, among the crafts referenced in Tazuri's directory: no copper or brass workshop is currently listed there. The best way to hear this hammering remains going to Place Seffarine itself, in Fez, at the hours when the workshops are active. To discover the other crafts currently catalogued across Morocco, the workshops listed on Tazuri remain the most honest starting point.