The House the Pasha Kept

Thami el Glaoui entertained Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, and Josephine Baker in this house. He served them meals on silver trays carried by enslaved servants.

Dar el Bacha — the Pasha's House — was the Marrakech residence of Thami el Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakech from 1912 to 1955. El Glaoui was the most powerful man in southern Morocco, a feudal lord who controlled the trade routes through the Atlas and ruled with a combination of extravagant hospitality and casual brutality that made him simultaneously indispensable to the French Protectorate and terrifying to his subjects.

The house reflects the man. The courtyard is enormous. The zellige and stucco work is among the finest in Marrakech — the Pasha hired the best craftsmen in the country and gave them no budget limit. The reception rooms were built to impress Europeans, and they did. Churchill came repeatedly. Colette wrote about the dinners. The guest list reads like a mid-century salon: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, the Aga Khan.

In 1953, el Glaoui conspired with the French to depose Sultan Mohammed V, the grandfather of the current king. It was the defining act of his life, and it destroyed him. When Mohammed V returned from exile in 1955, el Glaoui crawled to the palace on his knees to beg forgiveness. He died three months later.

The house was confiscated. For decades it sat empty. In 2017, it reopened as the Musée des Confluences, a cultural museum devoted to the intersection of Moroccan and global artistic traditions. The exhibitions rotate. The building does not. The zellige the Pasha commissioned is still on the walls. The courtyard where Churchill drank whisky is now a café.

The museum is worth visiting for the building alone. What you are standing inside is the aesthetic ambition of a man who betrayed his king and died for it.