Konya and the whirling dervishes

Konya sits on the high, flat plain of central Anatolia, a long way from the sea and from the beaches most visitors come to Turkey for. It is a large, serious, rather conservative city, and the reason most travellers stop here is a single building with a conical dome of green tiles. Underneath it lies Jalal al-Din Rumi, the poet and mystic the Turks call Mevlâna, "our master", who died here on the evening of 17 December 1273.

His followers did not mourn the date. They called it Şeb-i Arus, the wedding night, the night Rumi's soul was united with God, and it is still kept that way. After his death they organised themselves into a Sufi order, the Mevlevi, named after him, and from Konya it spread across the Ottoman world. Its best-known practice, the sema, is the turning ceremony that outsiders know as the dance of the whirling dervishes.

Under the green dome

Rumi was buried beside his father, and a mausoleum was raised over the grave by his successor. Around it grew a dervish lodge, with a hall for the ceremony, cells for the dervishes, a kitchen and a library. In 1926, after the Turkish Republic closed the Sufi lodges, the complex opened as a museum, and it has carried the name of the Mevlana Museum since 1954.

It is a museum in the way a cathedral is a museum. Many of the people walking slowly under the painted ceilings of the tomb chamber are pilgrims rather than tourists, Turks and Muslims from much further afield, and the mood is closer to a shrine than a gallery. Women cover their hair; people pause in front of the tomb, lift their hands and pray. The coffin of Rumi, draped and topped with a large turban, sits among those of his family and the leading dervishes of the order, each capped with the tall felt hat of a Mevlevi.

The crowds are real. Turkish press reports put the museum's visitors at more than three million in 2024. Early morning is the time to go.

Around the tomb, the old cells of the lodge have been fitted out to show how the dervishes lived: the kitchen where novices served their long apprenticeship, the instruments of the ceremony's music, and the robes. Beyond the museum the city has a fine scatter of older buildings from the time when Konya was the capital of the Seljuk Turks, who ruled much of Anatolia before the Ottomans.

What the sema is

The sema is not a performance, though it is often presented as one. It is a ceremony of remembrance, with its own order of music, prayer and movement, and it is meant to be watched in silence. The dervishes, the semazen, enter in dark cloaks and tall felt hats. When they drop the cloaks they are dressed in white, and they begin to turn.

Each dervish turns slowly at first, arms folded across the chest, then gradually unfolding until the right palm faces up and the left faces down: the usual explanation is that what is received from heaven is passed on to the earth. The white skirts lift and bell out as they turn. The music, with the reed flute, the ney, at its heart, is slow and long, and the ceremony moves through set stages, with the dervishes stopping, bowing and starting again. It is quieter and stranger than anything a hotel floor show suggests.

UNESCO first recognised the Mevlevi sema ceremony in 2005 and inscribed it on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. In Konya the ceremonies are held not in the museum but in the Mevlana Cultural Centre, a large modern hall a short walk away, and the official programme is set by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The December nights

The great occasion is Şeb-i Arus. Each December Konya holds a programme of commemoration in the days running up to the anniversary of Rumi's death, with a sema most evenings and the final, most crowded ceremony on the night of the 17th. Konya's guides give 7 to 17 December for the 2026 programme, which is the usual pattern, but the exact schedule and tickets are announced each year by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and it is worth checking before planning a trip around a particular night. The city fills, hotels fill with it, and the plain can be bitterly cold.

Outside December, the usual pattern is a ceremony at the cultural centre on Saturday evenings through the year, with tickets sold in advance; times and venues change, so check them before you go. A seat in the hall on an ordinary week is the gentler way to see one.

Tours that stop in Konya

Konya is on the long road between the Aegean and Cappadocia, which is why tours of Turkey so often stop the night here. The three holidays below all include the city.

Explore's eight-night A Taste of Turkey runs from Istanbul to Cappadocia, with Konya on the way and Çatalhöyük, the Neolithic settlement on the plain, and the Seljuk caravanserai at Sultanhanı among its stops, before Ihlara Valley, Göreme, Uçhisar, the underground city of Kaymaklı and the Soğanlı Valley. It departs in April, May, June, September and October.

Travelsphere's eleven-night Treasures of Turkey takes the western side of the country first: Istanbul, Çanakkale, Ayvalık, Pergamon, Kuşadası and Ephesus, Şirince, Aphrodisias, and the white terraces of Pamukkale with the ruins of Hierapolis, before Konya and Cappadocia.

Explore's fourteen-night Turkey in Depth goes from Istanbul to Ankara, Hacıbektaş and Göreme, then Konya, Lake Eğirdir and the ruins of Sagalassos, down to the coast at Kaş and Patara, and on to Saklıkent Canyon and Köyceğiz. It departs each month from March to November.

None of the Explore departure months falls in December, so a tour is a way to see the tomb and, if the night falls right, a Saturday ceremony. Şeb-i Arus is a journey to plan on its own, and to wrap up warm for.