Which city gave its name to a leather, and to a colour?

Fez, in Morocco, which gave its name to the hat and to the tanning tradition - and the tanneries there are still working the way they did in the eleventh century. The Chouara tannery in the old city is a courtyard of stone vats visible from surrounding rooftops, where hides are soaked in a mixture including pigeon droppings, whose ammonia softens them, and then dyed in vats of poppy, saffron, indigo and mint.

The hat is a piece of political history rather than folk costume. The Ottoman sultan Mahmud II made the fez compulsory for officials in 1826 as a modernising measure, replacing the turban - which had signalled religious and regional identity - with a uniform headgear that signalled being a subject of the state. A century later Ataturk banned it in Turkey for exactly the same reason in reverse: it had become the symbol of the old order.

Fez also has a claim to the oldest continuously operating university in the world. Al-Qarawiyyin was founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri, a merchant's daughter who spent her inheritance on it, and has been teaching ever since - which predates Bologna by two centuries and is recognised by UNESCO and the Guinness records, though whether a madrasa of that period counts as a university in the European sense is exactly the kind of definitional argument these claims turn on.