في دائرة الضوء practice, and material culture remained on the margins. This is where ethnographic collections matter: they treat everyday objects and practices as evidence, broadening the field of history to include groups, experiences, and ways of life that conventional sources do not always reveal.
Bab El Oqla, Tetouan: Local Culture and Its Artistic Horizon
Founded in 1928 in the heart of Tetouan’ s medina, this museum is now operated by the National Foundation of Museums, which fully restored and redeveloped it before reopening in 2022. A defining moment came on July 29, 1948, when the museum moved into its current home: the historic Skala bastion at Bab El Oqla, built around 1830 under Sultan Moulay Abderrahmane ben Hisham. The former military building became a distinctive museum space, offering visitors a rare window into the city’ s memory and cultural character.
Its galleries display a wide range of earthenware jars, plates, zellige, copper and ironwork, jewelry, musical instruments, and ceramics, objects that shaped everyday life in Tetouan, with particular attention to the city’ s architecture, women’ s dress, and social rituals. The building itself is striking: an Andalusian garden graces its entrance, echoing northern Moroccan domestic architecture and its blend of Andalusian and local influences.
Another section of the museum points toward a more conceptual understanding of traditional crafts as an art form rather than merely as everyday practice. Its embroidery, leather, zellige, and ceramics distill a long history that reflects Tetouan’ s story. Later generations of Moroccan painters drew on these local materials to forge a new visual language, giving easel painting a distinctly Moroccan character. This direction is most evident in the Casablanca School, especially in the work of Farid Belkahia, an innovator who brought local materials to the very core of painting’ s aesthetic composition.
Dar Si Said, Marrakech: Shaping Local Memory
Further south, in Marrakech, Dar Si Said is a leading example of ethnographic museums in Morocco’ s historic cities, documenting local crafts and memory.
The building began as a private residence, constructed in the late nineteenth century by Si Said ben Moussa, minister of war under Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz and brother of the grand vizier Ba Ahmed. It witnessed many chapters of history: under the French Protectorate, it housed the governor of the Marrakech region and later served as a public administration; from 1930, it took on a cultural role, eventually housing craft workshops and a museum of traditional arts. It remains one of the finest surviving examples of a nineteenth-century Moroccan house, with its materials and ornamentation lending it a quiet grandeur within the Red City.
Renovated by the National Foundation of Museums and reopened in 2018 as the National Museum of Weaving and Carpets, Dar Si Said today focuses on urban and rural carpets and textiles from across Morocco, from Marrakech to the Atlas and Anti-Atlas. Its collections also include woodwork, jewelry, ceramics, and arms, all part of the city’ s everyday history. Its carved, turned, and painted woodwork remains a highlight, and together these holdings create a living, integrated ethnographic setting.
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This national network of ethnographic museums is far more than a collection of storehouses for static objects.
Complementary Spaces
Other museums belong to this same constellation. In Rabat, the Oudayas Museum, founded in 1915 within the historic Kasbah of the Oudayas and now the National Jewelry Museum, traces the history of Moroccan jewelry and adornment across the centuries. In Fez, the Batha Museum, founded the same year in a nineteenth-century royal summer palace and since reopened as the Al Batha Museum of Islamic Arts, serves as the reference collection for the city’ s heritage, notably its blue ceramics and carved wood. In Tangier, the Kasbah Museum of Mediterranean Cultures, housed in the historic Dar el-Makhzen palace, links northern Morocco’ s archaeology to the Mediterranean’ s successive civilizations.
This national network of ethnographic museums is far more than a collection of storehouses for static objects. It is a living mirror of Moroccan artisans’ genius and of the richness of the country’ s social history. By preserving these landmarks and renewing their purpose, Morocco builds bridges between a heritage century in the making and its contemporary artistic and cultural aspirations.
Achraf El Hassani is a Moroccan critic and art historian writing on the visual arts, cinema, and photography.
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