It seems you can take a bus to almost anyway in Turkey from an otogar or bus station!
We are heading to Konya, the seventh largest city in Turkey, and the journey took four hours in a very comfortable bus with reclining seats and free drinks service. We arrived at 3pm having driven along a straight road most of the way with flat farmland either side.
We bought our bus ticket for the next morning and took a taxi to our hotel, the rather stylish Hotel Hich where we were welcomed by Gizem.
Our room was lovely, with a view of the mosque opposite.
Konya was the medieval Selcuk capital, but is now a place of pilgrimage for the Muslim world. It was the adopted home of Celaleddin Rumi, known as the Mevlana, the Sufic mystic who founded the Whirling Dervish sect in the C13th and whose writings helped reshape Islamic thought.
The Masnavi which he composed in Konya, is considered one of the greatest poems of the Persian language, a huge spiritual text that teaches Sufis how to reach their goal of being truly in love with God. His writings have been widely translated and Rumi sayings are often quoted.
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”
“What you seek is seeking you.”
“The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.”
The whirling ceremony or sema, frees the dervishes from earthly bondage and abandons them to the love of God. The clothes worn are symbolic, with the camel hair hat representing a tombstone, the black cloak the tomb itself and the white skirt the funerary shroud, hence casting aside the cloak during the ceremony denotes the dervishes have escaped from their tombs. We could have attended a performance but reviews suggest that while the music is mesmerising and the whirling fascinating, it is also very repetitive and very long. We did manage to catch a dervish whirling for the tourists in Istanbul.
Here we visited the Museum which was just round the corner from the hotel in the first tekke or lodge of the Mevlevi dervish sect.
The courtyard contained beds of roses and a fountain …
… and behind a building containing the Mevlana’s tomb topped with a turquoise spire and the original hall where the sema was performed.
We exited the museum by the Selimiye Mosque and considered walking further but the sky was very grey and the wind getting stronger and decided not to chance getting soaked, so we missed the medresi with tiled portals, the Alaeddin Park and the bazaar and chose tea instead!
It seems impossible to avoid dervishes here …
Later we ate bowls of manti or Turkish dumplings for dinner, mine with a meat filling and Chris’s with potato, both served with yogurt sauce and chilli flakes.
Breakfast … well another feast … then off to Egirdir!
Off Travelling Together 