Why the maâlem lays the panel face down

Zellige is a mosaic of glazed ceramic: thousands of small pieces, each cut by hand and then assembled into geometric patterns, that cover walls, fountains and floors across Morocco. The maâlem — the master craftsman — composes each panel upside down, glazed face against the ground, because that is the only position from which he can adjust the gaps between pieces to the millimetre before the plaster poured on the back sets the whole thing in place; the pattern only reveals itself, like a negative turned over, once the panel is flipped upright.

The material: Fès clay, firing, glaze

Zellige starts as a grey clay, rich in kaolinite, found in the Fès region: a mineralogical and geotechnical study of clays from northern Morocco for ceramic use confirms that this local Miocene clay still supplies the city's workshops today. Craftsmen shape and fire it into square tiles — traditionally around ten centimetres to a side — before glazing them; the tiles therefore come out of the kiln already glazed, and only afterwards are they cut by hand. The glaze is not painted onto a finished tile afterwards: it is part of the firing itself, which is what gives zellige its durability and its distinctive matte sheen, visible on an old wall in the Fès medina just as much as on a fountain built last year.

Each colour historically corresponds to its own glaze recipe and kiln know-how specific to the city: it is this continuity between the local raw material and the craft itself that explains why Fès, more than any other Moroccan city, has stayed associated with zellige above every other craft. Once fixed by firing, the colour does not move: this is what distinguishes, at a glance, an old zellige wall from tiling that merely imitates the pattern, whose surface colour always ends up wearing or scratching faster than the ceramic itself.

The gesture: cut with the menqach, laid face down, read from the back

Once fired and glazed, the square tiles are never used as they are: cutting is what makes zellige. The maâlem cuts each tessera by hand, with the hammer-chisel known in Morocco as the menqach. A reference guide to the Islamic monuments of Morocco describes this tool precisely: a small adze-like hammer, used to cut fired, glazed tiles by hand, piece by piece, into the exact shape a pattern calls for. No tessera is identical to its neighbour: each is fitted by eye to the ones around it, which makes a zellige panel, even one repeating the same pattern across a hundred metres of wall, literally unique piece by piece.

Assembly then happens in reverse. A reference work on the Islamic arts of Spain describes this step precisely: once fired and cut, the tesserae were laid on the ground face down, then assembled together according to the intended pattern. Plaster is poured on the back to fuse the whole into a single rigid panel. Until the panel is turned over, the maâlem is therefore working on the mirror image of what he is building: it is by reading the back, like reading a negative, that he checks every tessera is in place before the plaster sets everything permanently. The pattern, invisible until then, only appears the right way round once the panel is flipped upright and dry — and that final flip is the answer to the question this article opened with: the maâlem lays his panel upside down because that is the only position from which he can still correct the assembly before it becomes permanent.

The place: Fès and its UNESCO-listed medina

Zellige was not born in Fès. Its oldest known fragments, found at Sabra al-Mansuriyya in Tunisia, are thought to date to the 10th century, under Fatimid or Zirid rule, according to the reference encyclopedia of Islamic art and architecture published by Oxford University Press in 2009. The style then became more elaborate and spread widely in the first half of the 14th century, under the Marinid, Zayyanid and Nasrid dynasties who then shared the Maghreb and al-Andalus between them — as documented by the historian Georges Marçais in his reference work on the Muslim architecture of the West, published in 1954. That same 14th-century Marinid period is the subject of a study by a team of French and Moroccan archaeometrists (Ayed Benamara, Max Schvoerer, Mustapha Haddad and Aomar Akerraz), published in the journal ArchéoSciences in 2003: it examines a glazed ceramic mosaic covering found at Chellah, the Marinid necropolis on the edge of Rabat, with the aim of documenting the original manufacturing techniques to inform future restoration work.

Fès has remained, since that period, the most important centre of production for Moroccan zellige — the conclusion of a study on globalisation and resilience in the Fès zellige tradition, published in 2019 in the Journal of North African Studies. The city owes this continuity both to its local clay and to the way the craft is passed down, generation after generation, by maâlems trained in the same neighbourhoods for centuries. The Fès medina was also inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981 under the name "Medina of Fez", under cultural criteria (ii) and (v). It is within this listed area, and around it, that the zellige workshops listed on Tazuri work today.

Who cuts zellige today

The craft remains artisanal and is still passed down from maâlem to apprentice inside the workshop, rather than through a conventional school curriculum — as the same 2019 study on the Fès zellige tradition notes. But that transmission is shrinking: in 2018, only 7 out of 400 students were enrolled to learn the art of zellige in Fès, according to a report by the American newspaper USA Today. The gesture it describes — hand-cutting, tessera by tessera, with the same type of menqach already used by Marinid maâlems — nonetheless remains fundamentally the same as what archaeometrists studying 14th-century zellige at Chellah document: the technique has not, at its core, changed in seven centuries, even as the number of hands able to practise it keeps falling.

On Tazuri, all the zellige craft workshops listed across the country are the ones keeping this gesture alive day to day — in workshops of very different sizes, from a single room dedicated entirely to hand-cutting to more commercial setups combining zellige, tadelakt and pottery under one roof.

Where to try it

Watching zellige being cut in a workshop — rather than just looking at it laid on a wall — changes how you understand the object: you discover that the final pattern does not exist anywhere before it is flipped over, and that what looks like pure geometry is in fact the result of hundreds of manual gestures, each one slightly different from the last. It is also a chance to see, on the workshop floor, the back of a panel not yet turned over — the same mirror image already being read by the 14th-century Marinid maâlem at Chellah, before the plaster set it in place. To plan a visit, see the list of zellige workshops listed on Tazuri.