It was actually cool in the night – we hadn’t realised we were above 1000 metres. Fetched the fleecy blanket out of the lounge and then didn’t wake up until 10am!!!
Set off in the direction of Konya, stopping at a service station as we had to jet wash the van – not ideal, but it was absolutely ditched.
Once again, we were so surprised to find that Konya is a massive city, in fact, Türkiye’s seventh largest.
The drive through to the parking wasn’t as bad as expected, as it seems quite an open place, with a lot of big wide boulevards.
A pilgrimage place for Muslims, Konya was the adopted home of the Mevlána, the founder of the order of Whirling Dervish.
We saw his tomb this afternoon in the mausoleum at the Mevlána museum. He’s certainly worshipped! Had to put plastic bags over our shoes to go in, but infidels were welcome.
We checked and checked again where the whirling ceremony would be taking place and luckily we were parked about five minutes walk away!
It started at seven, but we were there just after six to make sure we beat the coach tours that never came! It was fairly empty as the show started in the lovely air conditioned Culture Centre.
Stunning ceremony, possibly one of the best things we’ve seen. Full of prayers and stuff we didn’t understand at the beginning, but once the whirling started we were transfixed. We cannot believe they could spin around for that long over three separate sessions.
They believe that it brings them closer to God and some of them certainly looked like they’d gone into a trance-like state. A couple of the dancers only looked about ten – how on earth they held their arms up for that period of time is incredible.
Back at the van, a Turkish man has just stopped by to chat. “Welcome to Türkiye, it’s nice to see some English people here, I used to live in Scotland for a while, by the way, I make carpets….”
