Taznakht and Saffron

In the winter of 1883, a French officer travelling as a Jewish rabbi came to a weekly market in the mountains south of Ouarzazate and watched men trading a brown wool cape with a great red eye woven into its back. The officer was Charles de Foucauld, who later became a hermit in the Sahara. The market was Taznakht. The cape was the akhnif, and the women who wove it were the Ait Ouaouzguite.

Their country is the Siroua, or Sirwa, the old volcanic massif that joins the High Atlas to the Anti-Atlas. It is high, dry, cold in winter, and sheep country: among the Ait Ouaouzguite, wealth was counted in the size of the flock. The akhnif came out of that wool, thick, sometimes mixed with goat hair, wide enough to throw back over the shoulders in warm weather and heavy enough to keep rain off a shepherd. Men wore it over the haik or the jellaba, Muslims and Jews alike. By the early twentieth century it had been collected into the Peabody at Harvard, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, the Quai Branly in Paris and the Newark Museum, and it is probably the most collected Amazigh textile there is.

Then it stopped. The cape took too much wool and too much time, imported clothes were cheaper, and when the French protectorate tried to revive it for tourists the women declined. Carpets were faster to make and easier to sell. The Ait Ouaouzguite turned their looms to rugs, and Taznakht became the name of a rug.

The rugs are the fine ones of the south. Where the Middle Atlas knots thick and loose, Taznakht weaving is tighter, lower in pile, and often mixes knotted areas with flatwoven bands and lines of twining in the same piece. The field is usually a warm ground, red, orange, brown or a yellow that goes toward ochre, carrying columns of small lozenges, diamonds with hooked edges, and borders of zigzag and comb. They are light enough to hang. Many were made small, for a saddle or a seat or a wall, and a large one is heavier in the hand than it looks.

Taznakht itself is a town of nine thousand on the road from Ouarzazate to Agadir. About seventy kilometres west along that road is Taliouine, and that is where the saffron is.

Taliouine sits on a dry plateau at about 1,200 metres, on the other flank of the Siroua. It has around five thousand people and almost all of Morocco's saffron: in 2012 it grew about four thousand kilos, 98 per cent of the national crop, which put Morocco fourth in the world and well ahead of Spain. The first written record of saffron there is a contract from 1776, and local historians say it was being stored in a granary two or three centuries before that. The bulbs go in from late August to mid-September. The purple flowers open at the end of October. For about a month, just after dawn, mostly women pick them, and from each flower come three red threads. It takes something like 140,000 to 150,000 flowers to make one kilo of dried saffron.

So saffron and the Ait Ouaouzguite rugs grew up two days' walk apart, and the question every dealer gets is whether the yellow in an old Taznakht is saffron.

Sometimes. Khalid Loukid, curator at the national museum of weaving and carpets in Marrakech, lists saffron among the dyes used in High Atlas carpets, and the Aramco World report from Taliouine records local artisans using it to dye wool for carpets. It gives a clear, warm yellow and it is fast enough on wool with alum.

But it was never the only yellow, and it was rarely the cheap one. Loukid's record gives yellow from pomegranate bark, from weld, from the bark of the apple tree pounded with alum, from a plant called garou, from tizra. Pomegranate bark gives the oranges too. A dye that costs as much per gram as saffron does, and sells for that much in a market seventy kilometres away, is not what most households boiled a kilo of wool in. The honest line is that a yellow in a vintage Taznakht may be saffron, is more often a cheaper plant, and from the 1960s on is most often a packet. The same curator dates the synthetic dyes in southern Morocco to the early twentieth century, when weavers around Ouarzazate had already switched almost entirely to imported colours bought in Marrakech.

The two trades still share a calendar. Saffron is picked in late October and early November, when the summer wool has been washed and spun and the looms go up for winter. The women who pick in the morning are the women who weave in the afternoon, in many houses. In the Siroua the dye recipes are a woman's property, passed from mother to daughter; Loukid records that in Taznakht wool was steeped in henna with slices of lemon to make brown, and that some women fumigated the wool and washed before dyeing as if for prayer.

De Foucauld came to the market looking for a route across the mountains and wrote down a cape. The cape is in museums now. The rugs that replaced it are still woven, still fine, still mostly red and brown with a little yellow, and the yellow is worth asking about, as long as nobody promises an answer.