As a native Californian, few things get on my nerves more than hearing the abbreviation, “Cali.” I don’t know why it irritates me so much, but I suspect it’s the knowing, insider-y tone that usually accompanies it. “Yeah, man, I just got back from a trip to Cali. It was hella cool.”
Aaargh. Also right up there is “Frisco.” Let me just tell you that Californians do not, ever, under any circumstances, refer to their state as “Cali,” nor “The City” as “Frisco.” San Francisco even famously had a laundromat called, “Don’t Call it Frisco.” I also dislike “Berzerkley,” “San Berdoo (San Bernadino)” and “The States (anyone in Hawaii referring to the Mainland).”
With these grating abbreviations in mind, I asked my Gadling colleagues what city nicknames bug them. The response was fast, furious and lengthy. Below, some highlights:
Anna Brones:Portlandia. Don’t even get me started.
Libby Zay: I personally hate “Hotlanta.” It’s also pretty annoying when people add “tucky” or “neck” as suffixes. As in, Fredneck, Maryland, or Brunstucky, instead of Brunswick, Ohio … I suppose Pennslytucky would be more of a geographic region.”
Author admission: Guilty as charged, Libby.
Kyle Ellison: “Lost Wages,” for Las Vegas, and “N’awlins” for New Orleans.
Elizabeth Seward:It depends on the day whether or not these bug me. I wish I didn’t know so many. “Beantown”; “Chi-town”; “Sin City”; “Nasty Nati (Cinncinati)”, “C-town (Columbus)”; “SoBro (South Bronx, oy)”; “Marighetto (what locals call my hometown of Marietta)”; “City of Angeles”/”LaLaLand”/”Tinseltown”; “The Big Easy.”
Elizabeth, I promise to never refer to my hometown of Thousand Oaks as “Thousand Jokes” again.
McLean Robbins:“Naptown” for Annapolis and “The District” from anyone not a local to Washington, DC.
Meg Nesterov:Calling cities the Paris/Venice/X/ of the North/East, et al.
Sean McLachlan, resident history buff: Missouri is often called “Misery,” generally by outsiders from northern states and occasionally by frustrated Missourians. The term actually has old roots. The 18th century French settlers in Ste. Genevieve found the place so boggy and full of mosquitoes that they nicknamed it misère.
The Zulu people of South Africa make up the largest ethnic group within the country. Mostly living in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, nearly 10-11 million Zulu people in the region now celebrate equal rights in South Africa. The Zulu culture is vibrant and fascinating. One of the most notable aspects of Zulu culture is Zulu dancing. Dancing is a community ritual within the Zulu tribe and most ceremonies feature dancing. Chants often accompany the Ingoma dances, which are considered to be one of the purest forms of Zulu dance. In this video from Vimeo user Alex Masterson, a small group of Zulu people dance a traditional dance.
“Why do some people not like that we have two mommies?”
That was the first thing that 7-year-old Faith Foster asked me when I walked into her family’s home, which is carved into a 400-foot-high, ¼-mile deep rock some 30 miles from the nearest town in rural southeast Utah. Faith’s parents aren’t lesbians; they are polygamists.
%Gallery-176236% Mention the word Utah in a word association game and the first thing people will say is “polygamy.” Utah natives get a little tired of the jokes and stereotypes, but there is no denying that polygamy, or “plural marriage” as its practitioners prefer to call it, is a part of the state’s history and culture. In 2008, the Denver Postestimated there were about 37,000 polygamists in the state. Although polygamy is illegal and Mormons outlawed the practice more than a century ago, authorities in Utah don’t typically prosecute consenting adults who take multiple spouses.
Shows like “Sister Wives” and “Big Love” and books like Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” have stoked the public’s interest in polygamy, and the ongoing saga of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the break-off Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who is currently serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting children, has brought further scrutiny into the polygamous lifestyle. (The stars of “Sister Wives” have filed a lawsuit, charging that Utah’s law banning polygamy is unconstitutional and on January 17, a federal judge will hear arguments in the case.)
I wanted to meet a polygamous family because it’s a part of the state’s heritage that I wanted to better understand. I also have a personal connection to a bigamist – now deceased – that I never learned about until recently.
My father’s sister, now deceased, married a man whom she thought was single in Delaware in the ’70s only to see him taken away by the police after just a few months of marriage. The knock on the door came after his first wife got wind of the fact that he’d married my aunt and he was imprisoned as a bigamist. My aunt, who was one of the kindest persons I have ever known, had no idea that he had another wife living in another state and severed all ties with him.
Muffins for Polygamists
How many artisanal muffins should one buy for a polygamous family that includes a husband, two wives and 13 children? That was the question I faced on a wintry morning last week at the Love Muffin Cafe in Moab, Utah, as I prepared to visit the Fosters at their lovely, cave-like home in a community called Rockland Ranch, which is about 45 minutes away from Moab, a mountain biking mecca and a base for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.
The enticing muffins were $3 each but I didn’t want to shell out $40 or more for muffins, so I bought just a half dozen and resisted the temptation to eat any myself on the long drive out to Rockland Ranch.
I had arranged to meet Lillian Foster with a little help from Anne Wilde, a plural marriage advocate based in Salt Lake City who once owned a second home at Rockland Ranch, but could tell that she was apprehensive about meeting with me. When I called Lillian to set up the meeting, she explained that Enoch, her husband, and Catrina, Enoch’s first wife, were in Missouri.
“I’ll have to get my husband’s permission for this,” she said.
Somehow I doubted that he’d welcome a journalist into his home, and my fear magnified when I called a day later and Lillian said that she hadn’t heard from him. But shortly after I explained that I planned to visit Rockland Ranch whether she had time to show me around or not, Lillian called back and said that Enoch had agreed to the meeting.
Life on the Rock
Rockland Ranch is not the kind of place one would stumble across by accident. The community of about 20 families, most living in homes carved into a mammoth rock, is located on a dirt road off of a lonely, paved road that dead ends at a panoramic view of the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park.
As I turned off of Route 191 onto the Needles Overlook road, I noticed there was a parked car with a bumper sticker that seemed like a fitting introduction to the neighborhood. “Darwin is Dead. Jesus Lives.”
After a mile or two on the dirt road, a massive curved rock with solar panels on top and colorful houses carved within came into view. Bob Foster, Enoch’s father, a polygamist who had three wives, 38 children and 87 grandchildren, founded the community in 1979. According to Nancy Lofholm’s excellent story on the community in the Denver Postin 2008, Foster, who passed away four years ago, founded Rockland Ranch after being “excommunicated by the Mormon Church, stripped of his seminary teaching job and convicted of bigamy.”
According to Lofholm, Foster leased the Rock and the surrounding 80 acres from the state of Utah and spent the preceding decades “blasting and carving it into his vision of a Christian community ever since.” At one point in the ’90s, Foster even operated a B & B at the Rock that drew a mostly European clientele.
As I drove past a hand-painted 15 mph speed limit sign, I saw a home with 13 bikes parked in front and an American flag befitting a roadside Perkins restaurant and knew I’d arrived at the Foster family home.
A cute, freckle-faced girl answered the door and a mass of children scurried around the kitchen. Seven-year-old Faith proudly showed me her notebook, which had a full page filled with the same line – “I love my family very much.” I asked where their mom was and Faith, in turn, asked me why some people don’t like families with two moms. I was speechless and thankfully Lillian walked into the room moments later.
Dressed in fashionable low-slung jeans and the kind of country-western themed blouse that the star of the TV show “Nashville” might wear, Lillian, 25, immediately disabused me of the notion that only an unattractive woman with few marriage options would resort to being part of a plural marriage arrangement.
My first order of business was to make sense of the sprawling sea of cute, friendly kids whirling around the house. Lillian, who has been married to Enoch, 33, since she was 18, told me that she had five kids, ranging from 7-year-old Faith to 3-month-old Joseph. Catrina, Enoch’s wife of 15 years, has eight children, with a ninth on the way.
The Fosters home school their children – Lillian teaches the younger children and Catrina is responsible for the older ones. I was interrupting their school day but the kids seemed to view my arrival as a pleasant break from their routine.
Lillian gave me a tour of their impressive home, and if I hadn’t looked up at the natural rock ceiling, I might not have realized it was a cave dwelling. The family’s deep religious devotion was obvious – there was a bible on the table with their names embossed on it, and there was a sign taped to the bathroom door that read, “Did you think to pray?”
“Whose room is that?” I asked, pointing to a doorway with a sign that read “Man Cave.”
“That’s Enoch’s office,” Lillian said. “It’s kind of a joke because it’s actually the only part of the house that isn’t in the Rock.”
Lillian told me that she could show me her bedroom but not Catrina’s.
“Since she’s out of town, it just wouldn’t be right,” she explained.
After the tour, Lillian took me out for a tour of the community and told me a little about herself and the Rock. There were 18 homes, most of them built by her husband and some of his partners in the community, with four of them still under construction. It’s a mixed community with some polygamists and others who are in monogamous relationships.
Anyone who wants to live at Rockland Ranch has to pass a six-month “trial period” where they are expected to spend time in the community and ingratiate themselves with their future neighbors before they can buy a home.
Lillian took me into a few of the half-built homes, and showed off the community’s solar panels, their water system, swimming pools, playground and a place they call their “Charity House,” which has a non-profit, volunteer-run community convenience store, a small gym and an unfinished area that will some day house families that can’t afford to buy a house in the Rock.
We climbed up a series of wooden ladders so Lillian could show me the view from the top of the Rock and she made fun of how carefully I ascended the ladders.
“I thought you said you were a hiker,” she joked.
As I surveyed the alpine scenery, Lillian asked me how I felt about plural marriage and seemed to relax after I told her that while I would never want to have multiple wives, I saw no reason why other consenting adults shouldn’t be able to live however they saw fit.
“That’s why our country was founded,” she said, as we walked down towards the end of the Rock towards a cluster of solar panels. “It’s freedom of religion.”
I asked her how her parents (whom she said were now divorced, but had been in a monogamous relationship) felt about her marrying a married man at age 18.
“My father was thrilled,” she said. “Because he knew Enoch and he knows what a good person he is.”
She said that plural marriage helped her “become more like Christ” in that she had to accept and love Catrina, which strengthened her character. Lillian, who grew up in Kamas, Utah, claimed that she detected no jealousy on Catrina’s behalf when she joined their household and didn’t hesitate when I asked her if she’d mind if Enoch took a third or fourth wife.
“You don’t take more wives unless all parties agree to it, but if the Lord directs it then great,” she said.
I also asked Anne Wilde, who was in a polygamous relationship before her husband died, why she or any other woman would be willing to marry someone who already has a husband.
“Because it’s a principle that was in the Old Testament: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, and so forth,” she said. “There were 30 men mentioned in the Old Testament that had more than one wife. The Romans changed it to monogamy and we’ve had that ever since. But we believe it’s a biblical principle and Joseph Smith restored the principle of plural marriage. In order to receive the highest degree of the celestial kingdom you have to have more than one wife, living in harmony and righteousness.”
‘Against the Stereotypes’
Wilde said that polygamists don’t get marriage certificates after their first wedding; but they do have religious ceremonies, where they are given “priesthood sealings.” Some brides take their husband’s name, others do not; some dress in a traditional wedding gown but not always; and many couples host fairly standard wedding receptions, even if it isn’t a first marriage.
The Denver Post story asserted that five of Rockland Ranch’s families were exiles from Warren Jeffs’s compound in Colorado City, Utah, and Laura Lofholm, the author of the piece, told me in an email that Jeffs kicked the men out because he saw them as a threat to his harem. Lillian denied that anyone living at Rockland Ranch had a connection to Jeffs, whose group once numbered about 10,000 strong, and insisted that she found him and his followers as repellant as the rest of the country. Anne Wilde was equally emphatic in denouncing Jeffs.
“We’re against the stereotypes – child abuse, welfare abuse, underage marriages,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Salt Lake City. “Those things have taken place, mostly in the FLDS community thanks to Warren Jeffs. We are very much against those things. We’re law-abiding citizens in every way except when it comes to polygamy – but that’s one thing we won’t compromise on.”
I told Lillian that Faith had asked me why some people didn’t like the fact that they had two moms and she said the question probably came up because Faith told a stranger at the supermarket one day that she had two moms and the woman gave them a dirty look.
“I hated to have to tell her that some people don’t approve of our living situation,” she said.
Lillian asked me about my life and as I briefly outlined all the places I’ve lived in or visited, the gap between our life experiences seemed vast.
“I’ve been to all the neighboring states plus Missouri one time,” she said. “But I don’t get a chance to leave this rock very often.”
I asked Lillian if she could introduce me to other members of the community but she said no one else could see me on “short notice.” I felt like the family was trying to manage my visit but after saying goodbye I decided to wander around a bit on my own. But on a cold weekday morning there was no one out and about.
I drove around to the back of the Rock and was surprised to see four or five freestanding houses, plus two rather dilapidated trailers that Lillian never mentioned. Just as I was beginning to wonder why the backside of the Rock wasn’t on my officially sanctioned tour, my rental car got stuck in the snow.
When I left the house, Lillian was getting ready to nurse Joseph, and the last thing I wanted to do was go back to the house and tell her that I decided to snoop around the back of the Rock and now needed help pushing my car out of the snow. As I made a huge racket spinning my wheels in vain, I had a bad feeling that someone was going to come out of one of the trailers with a shotgun, but I eventually managed to push and maneuver the car out of the snow.
As I drove away from the Rock, I thought about Faith Foster and the question she asked me. As a country, we’ve grown much more tolerant of alternative lifestyles in recent years. But are we ready to tolerate plural marriage? Should we be that tolerant? And will society judge Faith and her siblings harshly because they have two moms and a dad? Someday, I hope to return to the Rock to find out.
I’m sitting on a humble metal chair inside a traditional eight-sided Native American hogan, made with wood planks and packed dirt, trying to work up the courage to ask an intimidating Navajo medicine man if he has the power to heal me. The rich, deep red clay floor looks like the tennis courts at Roland Garros. A wooly sheepskin rug lies before us, a small American flag is hung on the wall, and there’s a loom with a colorful Navajo rug in the corner.
Over by the door, which faces to the east, the direction of the morning light, where Navajos believe that all good things come from, is a wood-burning stove. The smell of burning cedar fills the crisp winter air and the crackling of the fire punctuates the gaps in our conversation. Outside the hogan, the towering buttes and mesas of the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park lend an almost mystical aura to the place.
To my right is Herman Chee, a 60-year-old Navajo medicine man, and his grandson, Larry Holliday, who serves as an interpreter. Chee speaks some English, but is more comfortable speaking Navajo, an oddly melodic tongue with no alphabet that the U.S. military used to confuse Japanese code-breakers in World War II. Holliday is a baby-faced young man who is wearing a straw hat and has a blue handkerchief tied around his neck. He smiles easily when I ask his grandfather questions and radiates warmth.
Chee is a serious-faced man wearing a blue bandana, a long turquoise necklace and elaborate bracelets. His bulky medicine bag is on the floor between us and it looks like the sort of briefcase a pharmaceutical rep would schlep around hospitals and office parks. Each time I ask a question, he closes his eyes, grimaces and turns his head skyward before relaying his answer in Navajo, often using hand gestures to reinforce his points. It isn’t clear if my questions are annoying him or if he’s channeling some sort of spiritual guidance. My instinct as a journalist is to keep the interview impersonal but I have multiple sclerosis (MS) and I can’t leave this hogan without asking him if he’s confident he could heal me.
When I decided to visit Monument Valley, which sits right on the Utah/Arizona border inside the Navajo Reservation, the largest Native American reservation in America, I resolved to find a medicine man. It sounded like a fine idea but finding one proved to be a tribulation. Legitimate Navajo medicine men don’t have websites or Facebook pages and they don’t advertise in the white man’s Yellow Pages.
A contact in Utah’s state tourism office introduced me to Ronnie Biard, the general manager of Monument Valley’s Goulding’s Trading Post and Lodge, who agreed to help me find a medicine man.
“Finding a medicine man isn’t as easy as it used to be,” Biard warned. “It’s kind of a dying art.”
Patients use medicine men to cure them of illnesses but also to restore their spirituality, or purge bad mojo that comes from experiences the Navajo consider taboo, like seeing a dead body. According to a story in USA Today, some insurance carriers in the southwest cover ceremonies performed by medicine men, which can cost thousands of dollars. Medicine men are highly respected in their culture, but a few have abused that power in recent years.
In September, Francis Nez, a medicine man from Gallup, New Mexico, was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting members of his own family, and in 2007, a Navajo medicine man named Alden Chee (no relation to Herman Chee) was convicted of sexually assaulting a female client with a mental disability. Two other medicine men – Herbert Yazzie and David Filfred – were also convicted of rape in the last decade.
Biard asked if I was willing to pay the medicine man for his time and although I’ve never paid anyone for an interview, I was also asking the medicine man for a consultation or a service, so I felt that I could justify it. I told Biard that I wanted to ask the medicine man how they would cure someone with MS and he said that his wife also had MS and had used a Navajo medicine man to try to help improve her condition.
“She went to a sweat lodge and had them perform a ceremony for her several years ago,” he recalled. “I think it made her feel better for a while but I don’t think it really worked.”
“How much do you think they’ll want to meet with me?” I asked.
“I’m just going to throw a number out, and it’s possible they won’t charge at all,” he said. “I’m going to say $200.”
That was more than I could commit to, so I asked Biard to try to find a medicine man who’d be willing to meet me for $50. A few days later, Biard called to tell me that he’d found a medicine man willing to work with my modest budget and the following week, I found myself in the hogan with Holliday and Chee.
Chee tells me through his grandson’s interpretation that he “was picked by the creator, the element, the spiritual people,” to become a medicine man after his wife became very sick about 27 years ago and was treated by another medicine man who healed her.
“After the ceremony was done, she was healthy,” he says. “She recovered and to this day, she’s alive.”
Chee says that medicine men can help relatives but they can’t help themselves or their spouses.
“A lot of the people who come to see me were hit by lightning, which disturbs their spirit,” he says, when asked about his patients. “Or if they see a dead body. We Navajo are very superstitious, so when we go to a funeral, that interferes with our spirit.”
“So how would you treat someone who is struck by lightning?” I ask.
Chee says that he has instruments, tools in his medicine bag to treat them, but when I ask to see them he closes his eyes, grimaces, tightens his jaw, exhales deeply and is silent for several moments. I can hear the crackling of the fire and a bird squawking in the distance as the anticipation builds. I’m like a child hoping to get an ice cream cone.
“In the traditional way I learned from my teachers, these instruments were given to me to use in ceremonies, so this stuff is sacred,” he says. “It wouldn’t be right to bring them out just to show them to people.”
Chee tells me he was in the Air Force many years ago and has worked as a bus driver and a carpenter but is now simply a medicine man. I ask him if he refers very sick patients to medical doctors and he shakes his head dismissively.
“Most of the time, I don’t,” he says. “I can remove and fight witchcraft and illness. I’m a crystal gazer and a hand trembler. I help a lot of patients, even people with cancer. I’m so positive about my ceremonies, that I don’t usually recommend doctors.”
He says that his clients have to make a reservation to see him and that they pay him for his services, or if they don’t have money, they offer him turquoise, buckskins, sheep, jewelry, horses or even cows.
“What do you do if you get really sick?” I ask. “Do you visit another medicine man or go to a hospital?”
“I go to a doctor only if I have a severe illness or broken bones,” he says, as Larry gets up to add some logs to the fire. “But if I just have a fever or small illness, I go to another medicine man.”
Larry tells me that his grandfather wants to know more about me and I see this as the opening I’ve been waiting for. I explain that I have MS and would like to know if he’s treated people with this disease and if so, how and what was the outcome.
“There is a ceremony that can be done for this,” he says. “But you have to make a reservation.”
I suppose it makes sense – you don’t walk into a medical doctor’s office and expect to be treated on the spot – but the response caught me off guard and I wondered if they were expecting me to ask for a price quote. Perhaps they sized me up as a typical ignoramus who rolls into town and expects to have some natives do a tribal dance on the spot and I didn’t want to be that guy.
“How would you treat me?” I ask.
“After you make your reservation, I will go to the Sacred Mountain and ask the elements, all the different gods how to treat you. (The four sacred mountains mark the traditional boundaries of the Navajo Nation.) And I will get all those herbs and plants, bring them home and I will give you the medicine bundle. And I will build a fire and talk to the different gods to invite them to the hogan. I will look in my crystal and X-ray you with my crystal, from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head and that’s where these elements and different gods will talk to me and tell me how to treat you.”
“But does it work?” I ask.
Both men look at me as if to say, “Well of course it works, you damn fool. If it didn’t, why would we do it?”
“After the ceremony, you have four days where you don’t shower,” he says, after a long pause. “You’ll be covered in herbs and medicines and given some prayers and songs. They will put you back together in one piece. All the evil, the taboo will be left behind. It’s helped a lot of people. Five days later, patients come back and say ‘I feel much better.'”
I’m a skeptic by nature and I’m really not the sit in a circle and bang a tribal drum with people wearing tie-dye and taking peyote type of guy. I believe in science and drugs, not spiritualism and native healing. But after seven years of daily injections of a medication that would cost $50,000 per year if, God forbid, I was uninsured, I want to believe that Herman Chee, sitting next to me here in this hogan can cure me. Fuck injectable medications, I’m in the Navajo Nation now.
“To respect our ceremonies and traditions, you have to witness them,” Chee says, when I ask if white men are usually skeptical of his powers.
I have a deep respect for the Navajos and their traditions but I’m from another world, another culture. Still, half the battle in fighting illness is mental. If you believe you’re getting better, you can actually feel better.
But I resist the temptation to make a reservation for a ceremony because I don’t want to leave this hogan as a skeptic buying a ceremony just to test if it works, because under those circumstances, the experiment is doomed to fail. Herman tells me that he makes people feel better and I believe him.
I want to ask him about the three Navajo medicine men who were charged (two have been convicted so far) with sexual abuse crimes, but decide to lighten the mood first by asking if he knows of any cures for hangovers. As Larry translates the question, a huge smile breaks out across Chee’s distinctively featured face for the first time and both men begin to laugh hysterically before Chee responds.
“Give them another beer,” he jokes.
Medicine men don’t cure hangovers but they can help treat alcoholism, he says. I ask about the criminal medicine men and Chee says he doesn’t know them and knows nothing about their cases. He estimates that there are about 200 Navajo medicine men on a reservation the size of West Virginia with a population of nearly 300,000. But he suggests that they probably weren’t real medicine men to begin with and says that those who abuse their craft will have to pay for their crimes.
We step out of the hogan and the luminous glow of the towering, ageless buttes and mesas off on the horizon lend our meeting a fitting denouement. In these parts, where the landscape hasn’t changed much in centuries, it feels normal to be meeting with a medicine man. But Holliday and Biard mentioned that medicine men were becoming harder to find and I want to know if there will still be medicine men in the Navajo Nation 20, 50 or 100 years from now.
“Not too many young people are studying to be medicine men now,” Chee concedes. “But medicine men are always going to be here. Our prayers are always going to be here. Our language will always be here. That’s our survival. One hundred years from now, there will still be medicine men here.”
Being in Morocco, Tangier is a mostly Muslim city. Being a port, it’s also a mixed city with a long history of Christian and Jewish influence. That interesting blend comes out in the language, music, art and cooking. You can see Tangier’s mix of cultures everywhere.
Even in the churches.
The Church of St. Andrew is an Anglican congregation close to the Place du Grand Socco. The first thing you’ll notice is the church tower shaped like the square, Moorish-style minarets so common in the mosques here. The only difference is the English flag flying from the top and the lack of a loudspeaker to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer.
Entering the churchyard, you’ll find a shady oasis of trees, shrubs and a well-manicured garden. Cats lounge amid the headstones, which include several for the fallen from various Allied armies during World War II. This part of the property looks like a regular English churchyard except for the palm trees and lack of moss on the headstones. Go inside, however, and you’ll see something quite different.
The interior has several Islamic touches. The doors have rounded arches and elaborate carvings. The carved and painted wood ceiling looks like something from a Moorish palace. The arch just before the altar is the most elaborate and looks like it came from a Muslim palace. Arabic calligraphy spells out the words “bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm” (In the name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful), which is the first line of each Surah (chapter) of the Koran.
%Gallery-175720%So how did a verse from the Koran end up decorating an Anglican church in a Muslim country? The story starts in 1880, when the Sultan, Hassan I, gave land to the British expat community in Tangier so they could build a church. One was built but soon proved too small for the growing Christian community and so the present church was built in 1894. It was consecrated in 1905.
The design includes Islamic styles as a way of recognizing the friendly relations between the UK and Morocco and to honor the memory of the Sultan’s donation. The work was done by Moroccan craftsmen.
St. Andrew’s is by no means unique. During the height of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages, European art and architecture borrowed frequently from Muslim styles. European artists copied Islamic styles and even included Arabic calligraphy in Christian works of art. Check out the gallery for a couple of surprising examples.
Don’t miss our other posts on Tangier! Coming up next: The Anatomy Of A Perfect Hotel!