Keeping up here has been difficult. We’re just too busy, but let me just give you some selected pictures and comments.
We met with a travel agent our trusted hotel guy recommended. He put us on a whirlwind tour of the places we wanted to go. Konya and Cappadocia. Fortunately I’d done a bit of research and knew we could get a fast train to Konya and then a bus the rest of the way. On the map below, Konya is to the lower left of the red circle showing the Cappadocia region. We stayed in Göreme, which is northeast of Kayseri. Istanbul is in the upper left between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.
These men whirled slowly, like they were connecting with the universe.
See more on Sufi dervishes here.
Konya proved a true highlight. I’d seen that Çatalhöyük was closed on Mondays, so we left Saturday. Our travel agent arranged for a guide with knowledge of Çatalhöyük who picked us up at the train station. WhatsApp proves to be very helpful communicating.
Çatalhöyük is a world heritage site.Our guide turned out to be a Sufi teacher who teaches college level - not only was he knowledgeable, but he practiced his Sufi - with lots of care for us. I’d also read that there were whirling dervish (performance isn’t the right word,). There’s a huge modern building where they whirl on Saturday evenings from 7-8 or so. Our guide showed us where it was before dropping us off at the hotel. We had a delicious local meal
next door to the hotel and then walked to the Mevlana Center. (
Mevlana, as I understand it, is the Turkish name for Rumi, the founder of Sufism.)
The next morning we walked a bit after breakfast and I was duly impressed by this blue motorcycle.
We were scheduled to go to the Mevlana Museum, which was across the street from the hotel. We didn’t realize that - we thought it was a mosque. And it had been a mosque, but is now a museum for Mehvlana (Rumi). But the name ‘museum’ doesn’t do it justice. It had been a like a monastery for men studying to become Sufi dervishes (I need to be careful here with my terminology. My understanding is they would become monks, though again I’m not sure that’s the right word.) So in addition to the old mosque, attached to it are a series of cells for the acolytes.
The picture below shows Mevlana’s tomb inside the old mosque. Rather than requiring people to remove their shoes, they provided paper shoe covers to wear.
There is a mosque right next to the museum. There’s a pic below showing the mosque (to the right) and the museum from the night before when we walked back from the dervishes.
The picture above is Çatalhöyük. This is a site that dates back to the
Neolithic period. (Yes, I had to look it up to better understand what we were looking at).
But 9000 years ago, people built this community of 3500 - 8000 people. The living spaces are all connected to each other. There were no streets. People had ladders inside to the roof, and the roofs were the ‘streets’ of this place. There’s a museum which explains a lot, then there are some reconstructed dwellings that you can go into to see how people lived. Finally, there is the actual archeological site.
I’m going to let people who are interested, go to the link to find out more. The picture above is a tiny part of the complex under a large cover that visitors are allowed to see. There’s another section open to the public, but it wasn’t open when we were there.
I’m still trying to grasp people who were only just beginning to transition from hunter/gatherer to growing some of their own food, and developing this complex housing system.
The picture below shows the mosque, to the right, and the Mevlana Museum. The green tiled turret is the museum area is from the original building, which if I got it right, was build in the 1200s. The rest was built later.
Think about it. The turquoise green turret in the back of the museum complex was built over 200 years before Europeans Columbus’ reached what became ‘the new world.,’
There is a lot referenced in this post that people know little or nothing about, so I won’t feel bad if I don’t post again right away and give you time to check out the links.
