Church/ Cathedral/ MonasteryMadrasa Ben Youssef

[koshkha, 04.08.2007] The Ben Youssef Medersa (or Madrasa) may be recognisable to viewers of the 1998 film 'Hideous Kinky' in which it "stood in for" an Algerian Sufic retreat. Medersas are a type of "Koranic school" and this one dates to the 14th Century and was enlarged to "its current dimensions" in the mid 16th Century and then "polished up" in the late 1990s by the Ministry of Culture. You can now visit it for a cost of 30 dhirams. Visitors enter via a "long, cool passageway" that takes them to the courtyard where there's a real feel of "serenity" centered on a "water-filled basin". The facades are decorated with "tiling, stucco and carved cedar" - all the decoration is "restrain(ed)". Upstairs there are more than 100 "tiny windowless students' chambers".