A couple of months back, we carried a post on our glass negative collection, and unveiled an undated – but probably early Twentieth century – photo of a long-gone medina institution, Club Elixir.
One of our neighbors in the medina thought he recognized the location, and took a little cell phone picture of it to show us. It certainly bore all the hallmarks of the same location, Place Sakaaya.
So we sent Mohammed Jadidi of TALIM, fresh from his digital photography course, to take a "then and now" shot of the same square. There might be a few more stories on some of the buildings, and a lot more in the way of street vendors, but here it is in April 2013:
It turns out that another TALIM staffer, Fatima Benguerch, who teaches Arabic literacy to the women of the medina, was born in the same building, during another one of its iterations after the demise of "Club Elixir." There are almost no more elixirs of any sort in the medina, another vestige of International Naughty Zone Tangier that has gone by the wayside.
But we're glad to see that the square is as lively as ever. We hope to provide more "then & now" photo pairs as we discover the treasures in our glass negative collection.
Gerald Loftus
