The Koubba

The history of Morocco is a succession of capitals. The successive dynasties, having overthrown the previous one, always create a new capital in their own tribal territory, spectacularly humiliating the city of their defeated opponent, looting and destroying it, and tearing down and carrying away the marble covering and decoration of their royal buildings and mosques to decorate the ones of the new capital.

Marrakesh was founded in 1070 against the northern Fez by the Berber Almoravids coming from the nearby Atlas valleys. Organized by fanatical Muslim preachers, this dynasty quickly took control of the trade routes south of the Atlas, along which gold flowed from the Ghana empire to Morocco. Then, with this military and economic background, they easily occupied Andalucia, where the golden age of the Cordoban caliphs ended around this time. Marrakesh became the center of a rich world empire spanning two continents, and the first Almoravid caliph ruling from here, Ali ben Youssef (1106-1143), tried to make the city worthy of this rank. This ruler, born of an Andalusian Christian mother and raised in a cultured Andalusian environment in Ceuta, saw Córdoba as his role model. He tried to build the first mosque of Marrakesh on the model of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, bringing architects and even building elements – capitals and marble carvings – from there, including from Medinat al-Zahra, the Cordoban caliphate city looted and destroyed by the Almoravids.

The Ben Youssef Mosque still stands to the north of the bazaar. However, this is no longer the one built by Ali ben Youssef. The Almoravid mosque, along with the entire city, was destroyed by the next fanatical Berber dynasty, the Almohads, after the capture of Marrakesh in 1147. Then the mosque built on its place and destroyed again, was rebuilt again by the Saadi dynasty in the 1550-70s, and then by the Alawi dynasty in the early 19th century.

Postcard of the mosque based on Marcelin Flandrin’s photo, 1930s

However, just as there are survivors of every destruction, who survive by hiding in basements, locking themselves in warehouses, pretending to be dead, so there are three survivors of Marrakesh’s first heyday.

One is the Almoravid mimbar – pulpit –, one of the masterpieces of Islamic art, which Ali ben Youssef ordered in Córdoba in 1137, and which the Almohads took to the Kutubiyya mosque built by them, which is why it is usually referred to as the Kutubiyya mimbar.

Detail of the mimbar

The other, also imported from Córdoba, is a marble water tank richly carved with vegetal patterns and animal figures, once used for ritual ablution. According to its inscription, it was ordered by Abd el-Malik ben El Mansour, courtier of the Cordoban Umayyad caliph Hisham II, between 991 and 1008. It was probably brought from there by Ali’s father Youssef ben Tashvin, after the sack of the city. Today it is in the Ben Youssef madrasa or theological school, next to the above mosque, which I will write about soon.

The Umayyad water tank in the courtyard of the Ben Youssef madrasa in the 1930s

And the third is the Koubba. This word, meaning “dome”, traditionally denotes a tomb. This small architecture, however, was not built as a tomb, but as a pavilion for ritual ablution, a midaʿa, in front of the Ben Youssef Mosque. At the bottom it had a basin for washing, and it was surrounded by latrines and basins for giving water to animals. In this way, it was not only a religious, but also a public service institution for the bazaar that extended south of the mosque. This is probably why it was saved. The bazaar gradually grew around it and covered it, while the ground level that rose at a height of 7-8 meters due to the destruction, covered its entire lower part. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that they began to excavate and free it form the stalls built on top of it. It was restored in recent decades and has been open to visitors since last February.

In the aerial photo from 1930-31, the Ben Youssef Mosque is in the middle, with the newly excavated Koubba in front of it

The lower part of the building opens onto the pool with two horseshoe-arched gates on the longer sides, and one multi-leaf gate on the shorter sides. The internal arches of the latter are decorated with a beautiful geometric pattern. On its inner cornice, a Kufi inscription dating back to 1125 runs around, gloryfing Allah andd the builder Ali ben Youssef.

On the longer side of the upper part, there are five alternately multi-leaf and horseshoe-arched windows, while on the narrower side two multi-leaf ones. The dome rises above the upper, fringed cornice, whose complicated brick architecture, as we will see, is purely decorative and does not reflect its real architecutre visible from the inside.

The windows illuminate the lower part of the dome. This dome is the most special element of the koubba. It is supported by intersecting multi-leaf arches starting from the third points of the cornice. The arches transform the square into an octagon, and then into the beehive-like dome. The undecorated white surfaces of the arches, the octagon and beehive emphasize the structure, while the infill surfaces between them are covered with colored stucco, acanthus and palm leaves, with an accented central shell on each of the eight eaves. This structure is obviously a development of the mihrab, prayer niche of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, but it is even more special as far as it solves the basic problem of all domes, the squaring of the circle without the intervention of a tambour, the intermediate element usual in Western domes that transforms the square into a circle.

The dome and multi-leaf entrances of the mihrab of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, built around 960

The entire architecture cannot be well photographed. From the street, you can only see the upper part, while up close is difficult to capture in a picture. Its prominent point of view is the roof terrace of the Les Almoravides café to the west of the mosque, from where it is clearly visible how it is located at the entrance of the bazaar, surrounded by the market, but keeping a small distance from it, and lowered, as a witness to a former city on a different level not only in space, but also in time.

The boat of Saint Peter

In the last days of March 1506, just before the Feast of the Annunciation, the oldest and holiest church of Western Christianity — the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome — began to be dismantled. The culprits were no pagans or heretics, but Christ’s own earthly representative and Saint Peter’s successor himself: Pope Julius II.

The official reason was the supposed disrepair of the ancient basilica, founded by Emperor Constantine the Great. But for the megalomaniac pontiff, it was the perfect excuse for yet another grand project — to join the ranks of his other colossal commissions: the never-finished tomb designed by Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel he had the same artist paint, and the papal apartments he had Raphael decorate. Now he wanted something even more monumental — a new mother church for Christianity that would also immortalize his name.

The project broke not only the old basilica but also the Church itself. The indulgences sold to fund construction sparked Martin Luther’s protest — and the Reformation. Two centuries later, the endeavor limped to an uninspired close: a vast but characterless barn of a church, a patchwork of banal architectural ideas. Its colossal scale is diminished by a mediocre façade, and even its one saving grace — Bernini’s grand colonnade — was visually “deflated” when Mussolini drove his grand avenue straight up to it in the 1930s.

Something else perished, too — a true emblem of the Church, a jewel of the old basilica, and one of the masterpieces of a new artistic age. The façade of the old basilica had once been adorned with a monumental mosaic by Giotto: the Navicella, or The Boat of Saint Peter. The work was commissioned sometime between 1300 and 1330 by Cardinal Jacopo Gaetani Stefaneschi, the same patron who had Giotto paint the triptych now kept in the Vatican Picture Gallery.

The mosaic depicted the scene from Matthew 14:24–32 — when the apostles’ boat is tossed by a storm and Christ appears, walking upon the waves. Peter longs to walk on the water too. Christ beckons him, and Peter takes a few miraculous steps before doubt overcomes him and he begins to sink — until Christ reaches out, saving him and pulling him back into the boat. The image is as symbolic as the story itself: the Church represented by the boat, and Peter — the pope — wavering between faith and frailty as he struggles to steer it through the storm.

Parri Spinelli’s free copy of the mosaic, ca. 1420, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The demolition of the old basilica and the construction of the new one advanced gradually, from the apse toward the façade. By 1610, the works had reached the front of the church. By then, the basilica’s clergy had recovered from their initial shock and began rescuing what they could. The mosaic was detached and reassembled, but in the process, much of its original character was lost. The version that Orazio Manenti installed above the interior doorway of the new basilica in 1674 is more a weak Baroque imitation than a faithful restoration. One doubts Giotto would have claimed paternity for it.

Fortunately, several contemporary copies of the original mosaic survive — and they are of far higher quality than the mutilated remnant in Rome. One of the finest can be seen in Strasbourg, in the Church of Saint Pierre Le Jeune, where the composition — contemporary with Giotto’s original — was reimagined north of the Alps in the Gothic style that was fashionable there.

 

Another, painted not long after, was executed by Andrea di Bonaiuti between 1365 and 1367 in the so-called Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence — a version I’ll soon write more about in detail. In Bonaiuti’s fresco, the wind-blowing demons have vanished, replaced by a fisherman on the left — utterly absorbed in his fishing, oblivious to the miraculous scene before him, like the fisherman in Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus.

And in 2016, fragments of a 14th-century copy were uncovered in the ruins of the medieval Saxon church of Kiszsolna (Senndorf/Jelna) in Transylvania. Along with those in Strasbourg, Florence, and Pistoia, it is one of only four contemporary European reproductions of Giotto’s Navicella. The composition can only be recognized by the trained eye, so rather than reproducing the image here, I’ll direct readers to art historian Tekla Szabó’s excellent study, which also shows how Giotto’s design inspired other contemporary frescoes in Transylvania and Upper Hungary — depicting sailing ships that symbolized either the Church itself or the martyrdom of Saint Ursula and her companions. An article of the since defunct Népszabadság nicely summarized the importance of that discovery.

The church of Kiszsolna today and in the 1940s, with the remaining fresco fragments in the sanctuary

A year ago, however, another boat arrived in the Vatican — no less symbolic than Giotto’s mosaic vessel. In 1986, when the water level of the Sea of Galilee dropped unusually low, archaeologists discovered in the mud a nine-meter-long sailing boat — a typical fishing vessel from the time of Christ, with four oars and room for twelve men. Carbon dating and ceramic analysis placed it between 50 BC and 50 AD, meaning it could well have belonged to Peter or one of his fellow fishermen.

A replica of this Galilee Boat, made for the Aponte family — a seafaring dynasty from the Bay of Naples active since the 17th century — was presented to Pope Francis in March 2023, just before the Feast of the Annunciation.

This Boat of Saint Peter, though not mounted on the basilica’s façade, now welcomes modern pilgrims at the entrance to the Vatican Museums, set in the middle of the grand staircase leading up to the galleries — a quiet reminder of the Church’s origins, and an anchor cast deep into time.