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 last serf village in Europe

As you drive from Málaga airport through the Málaga mountains into the interior of Andalusia, just before the Antequera junction where the roads branch off to Seville, Córdoba and Granada, a compact cluster of houses looks down from a hilltop along the way. Traditional Andalusian white houses, standing shoulder to shoulder, coming together as a single closed settlement, as if they were preserving an old story. I give in to my gut feeling and pull off the highway to listen to that story.

Approaching the village on the access road, the compactness of the settlement is even more striking. Behind the fields and olive groves shining in the warm January sunlight, the white façades arranged in a straight line seem to be the first protective wall of a fortified settlement, and to the right, the large block of buildings behind the white church tower looks like a fortified monastery or a castle.

And it is indeed. As I park the car on the left side of the village and walk down Granada street between closed rows of white houses leading to the church – the other two streets are named after Seville and Málaga, as if giving a hint as to where you can go from here –, the many-windowed façade of a large, thick-walled block of buildings gradually unfolds behind the white church tower. This large peasant castle, assembled over the centuries, is none other than the Moorish castle of Cabeche or Qawŷ.

The castle of Cabeche was first mentioned by the 10th-century Córdoban historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Razi in his History of the Rulers of Andalusia, which became known in Spanish as The Chronicle of the Moorish Rasis. According to this, the castle was built in the early period or golden age of Andalusia, sometime during the Umayyad emirate.

The castle of Qawŷ was mentioned in the chronicle Yannat al-Rida of the 15th-century Muhammad Abu Yahya ibn ʿĀsim from Granada among the castles that the Christians captured in 1410 on the western border of the Sultanate of Granada, but in 1447 the Muslims recaptured from them for a while. Ibn ʿĀsim describes the location of the castle quite precisely, and it roughly coincides with the castle of Cauche. It is not known whether this is identical with the castle of Cabeche mentioned by al-Razi, because he does not localize it exactly, but it is not excluded.

What is certain is that the castle, as a Moorish fortress, oversaw the main road from Málaga to Medina Antequera for centuries.

However, the settlement has a much older history. A little south of the former Moorish fortress, the foundation walls of the Roman-era town of Aratispi are still visible, which the locals also call Cauche el Viejo, as if the original population of today’s Villanova de Cauche came from there. The mill of the village, which today stands in ruins on the banks of the Cauche river, was also built from its carved stones. And this is also where three beautiful carved stones with Roman inscriptions from the 2nd century come from, built into the tower of the village church in 1731, so placed as to indicate not simply the use of free stone material, but antiquarian interest.

The stone on the SE corner commemorates the death of Emperor Trajan (53-117), who was born in this province, Hispania Baetica. It ends: Res publica Aratispitanorum decrevit et dedicavit – ordered and established by the community of Aratispi

A tombstone on the S wall with the initials M. Fulvio Senecioni Aratispitano – erected to Marcus Fulvius Senecio of Aratispi by his friends

The stone on the E wall of the tower was erected in honor of Emperor Hadrian (76-138), who was also born in Hispania Baetica: Res.P. Aratispitana D.D. – ordered and installed by the Aratispi community

After King Ferdinand II in 1487 captured Málaga, the southernmost stronghold of the Sultanate of Granada, the castle of Qawŷ, which depended on it, also fell, and the king had it destroyed along with several other small Moorish fortresses. The depopulated area of the castle was resettled in 1509 by the nearby town of Antequera with Christian residents. This is why the name of the village was expanded with “Villanueva”, new settlement, so characteristic of Andalusia that was undergoing a change of population. Their descendants are the 65 inhabitants of today’s Villanueva de Cauche. The land was given to the Arreses noble family, whose eighth descendant, Pedro de Arreses y Aspillaga was raised to the rank of Marquis in 1679. They built today’s manor house on the ruins of the Moorish fortress, to the wall of which the three streets of the village run.

The inhabitants of the thirty-five houses of the three streets were thus the serfs of the Marquis of Cauche for several centuries. They cultivated their lands, partly in the form of compulsory free work, partly for their own benefit, but in return for a tithe. Even at the turn of the millennium, the residents of Cauche regularly delivered chickens and crops to the manor house. Although they had lived in their houses for generations, they had no title deeds, only a document signed by the Marquis, which allowed them to live there. In this way, the houses could neither be sold nor rebuilt.

After 2005, the new heir reorganized the noble estate into a modern farm and gave the residents of Cauche the opportunity to buy the land they cultivated at a price of 90 euros/m². This was realized, but the new owners only received a private contract without an entry into the land registry, because the Antequera land registry was not able to transform the records of the Marquis’s estates according to the new parcels. Finally, in 2015 it was possible to solve the reorganization and register the ownership of the lands and houses. In 2015, the Middle Ages ended also in the last serf village in Europe.

All this did not change in the view of the village. Its most significant building is still the Marquis’s manor house with the church. Apart from this, there is only one community institution in the village, the “Antigua Peña”, Old Club, that is, the pub. It was closed when I was there now, but according the local papers reporting on the end of feudalism, there is a lot going on here. There is no store: a grocery truck comes twice a day with bread, meat, fish and other basic foods, and on Saturdays the mobile supermarket. “In which other village do they deliver the goods to your door?” the residents say proudly. The built heritage of the village is subject to strict regulations of monument protection. Even if the Middle Ages are over, the traditional Andalusion white houses – preserved by the constraints of serfdom – must be maintained without any changes.

Villanueva de Cauche photographed from a plane this afternoon