The Journal · Craft
Picture Fez in the 10th century. In the workshops of the medina, artisans cut small pieces of enamelled terracotta one by one with a sharp hammer. Each piece is called a furmah. Assembled, they form stars, rosettes and interlacing patterns that seem to unfold to infinity. This is zellige — literally “little polished stone” — and it has barely changed in a thousand years.
Zellige is not mere decoration. Behind its patterns lies a science of geometry that mathematicians still study: rotations, symmetries, perfect tilings of the plane. Master artisans — the maâlems — spend years learning to compose these figures without ever drawing them; the geometry is passed from hand to hand, generation to generation.
You will find it on the fountains of riads, the columns of the al-Qarawiyyin mosque, the walls of the palaces of Marrakech and Meknes. Long reserved for royal and religious buildings, zellige gradually entered homes and, in recent years, interiors around the world. Today's “zellige trend” in decoration is simply the rediscovery of a thousand-year-old art.
At ITRI, we do not claim to make zellige — that privilege belongs to the maâlems of Fez. We design after it. Every pattern in our collections starts from a traditional composition, redrawn by hand for a contemporary object, then printed in high definition on cases built to last. The geometry stays exact; only the scale changes. The deep blue of a Bleu Nuit case or the starred grid of a Kora No.10 descends directly from a pattern born in a Fez workshop.
A thousand years after the first workshops of Fez, zellige is still travelling. It simply fits in one hand now.
From the Arabic zellij, “little polished stone”. It names the Moroccan mosaic of enamelled terracotta tiles, cut one by one with a sharp hammer and assembled into geometric patterns.
Portuguese and Spanish azulejos are painted tiles, often figurative and large. Zellige is a mosaic: hand-cut tesserae assembled into geometric compositions. Azulejos actually descend from Moorish techniques brought to Iberia.
In Fez, the Bou Inania and al-Attarine madrasas are dazzling examples. See also the Bahia Palace and Saadian Tombs in Marrakech, or the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca.
Yes. In Fez especially, the maâlems keep cutting furmah by hand; training a master takes years. That living craft is what inspires the patterns of the ITRI collections.
