Volubilis

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27 April

Just outside Meknes, and certainly a factor in the selection of the location for Meknes, is the old Roman city of Volubilis that sits out in a wide valley. It was one of the most remote outposts of the Roman Empire and was a flourishing capitol of North Africa between 40-280 AD before being overrun by the local Berber tribes. For nearly 250 years the Romans maintained this city of 20,000 people of Romans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians and Berbers about 1000 miles away from Rome in the midst of locally hostile groups - pretty impressive for a bunch of men in dresses, short skirts and dainty leather sandals!

It features almost all of the hallmarks of a major Roman city except for an ampitheater, but it is probably most famous for its stunning tile mosaics that brightened the homes of the rich and famous of Volubilis. A popular motif was Hercules, as he was said to be active in this part of the world. The mountains on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar were in Roman times known as the Pillars of Hercules.

This turned out to be a wonderful day, with a shared taxi to the nearby pilgrimage town of Moulay Idriss (who was the great grandson of the Prophet Mohammed) followed by a 30-minute walk out to Volubilis through olive orchards, wheat fields and glorious red and yellow wildflowers. Volubilis was a major exporter to Rome of wheat and olive oil, so it was easy to imagine the setting long ago as the city gets larger and larger with every step.

My mother said she had just seen her first Roman site a month ago in Croatia after all of her travels, and I guess this is my first true Roman site as well. I have seen Roman arches and building foundations in other European cities and aqueducts and ampitheaters in southern France, but they were always surrounded/engulfed by later buildings. This was the first time I had ever seen a Roman city standing on its own without other architecture around it. When you look at all of the limestone blocks in the roads, walls and columns and then look out at the nearest sources of limestone a few miles away and 500 feet above the plain, it is really amazing what the Romans accomplished; and this was a really minor city out in the boondocks, not one of the major sites. It would stand even more impressive had it not been sacked by Sultan Moulay Ismail of Meknes for his own architectural needs and then suffered from a major earthquake in the late 1700s.

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