Saturday/Sunday, June 21/22

Saturday

We left Egirdir this morning around 10ish after a slight miscommunication about the location of the Fez bus resulting in David having to claim 80% of the seats on the bus with various articles of his luggage which in turn led to several disgruntled Fez travelers. We met up with our Kiwi friends on the bus, but unfortunately our wonderful tour guide Amanda was touring in the southwest of Turkey. We arrived in Konya around 3:30 starving as is the norm of our group, and sat down to a lunch of etliekmek, a local specialty that is similar to thin crust pizza without the cheese. Afterwards, we met up with another rug-dealer friend of Prof. Shields in his shop and had another local specialty – alta cay, or mountain herbal tea.

Mehmet, the carpet dealer, has a unique mission with his rugs, which are mainly kilims, or woven instead of knotted rugs. He teaches local women in Konya (and the village where he’s from where we’re going after Konya) how to weave, provides them with raw materials including loom, and then pays them directly. The fact that he pays the women directly and not their male superior is quite remarkable and gives them an incredible amount of empowerment that we take for granted in the US. He also works with natural dyes, which is fairly uncommon in Turkey.

So Mehmet took us to see some of the local weavers at their homes. I’m sure we looked very odd – a huge van full of Americans pulling up into these very residential neighborhoods and then piling out of the van and into a random house.

a woman weaving a kilim

a little girl that lived at the house where we watched the woman weave

After seeing the weaving, we went to the place where he experiments with natural dyes. He had huge vats full of dye and enormous amounts of already dyed yarns hanging everywhere.
His dyeing place was also in a residential neighborhood where a huge group of kids were playing on the street. After a few rounds of the usual “Hello!”s that we hear all the time, we motioned for them to come over and took a lot of pictures of them, which they loved. There was also a cow roaming around that was in desperate need of a milking, and a kitten that Zoe instantly befriended. All very normal everyday things to see in Turkey.

the cow desperately in need of a milking

kids in the neighborhood

a group of gypsy women that we saw on the highway

After that it was a quick dinner – for us doner in a restaurant that boasted a frieze of a doner man, then on to seeing the whirling dervishes. As I have explained earlier, the whirling dervishes are part of a sect of Islam called Sufi. The practice of the whirling dervishes arose from the teachings of Mevlana, or Rumi, who is actually a bestselling poet in the US. Under the rule of Ataturk, whirling dervishes as part of a religious ritual were outlawed, but they were allowed to continue as long as it could be considered a folk dance – aka, open to the public to watch. So after our experience with sema (the name of the ritual in which the whirling takes place) in Istanbul, it was very interesting to see the dervishes from the viewpoint of a performance.

But it seemed it wasn’t just a performance – Muammer told us that 50% of the audience was Konyans who came to the performance as if it were an actual sema. The leader of the dervishes prayed at the end, and almost everyone in the audience also prayed. So I’m not sure how much of a “folkdance” it actually is.

Sunday

We had a very interesting sleep which included most of us waking up to the sunrise (about 5 AM) call to prayer and Emily not waking up but sitting straight up in bed. Today we went to a record number of mosques and museums – I think it was somewhere around 4 mosques, 3 museums, and 2 tombs. In one of the mosques we went to was the tomb of Shems, Rumi’s friend and teacher, and there we had several interesting experiences. First, we experienced the perpetual Turkish hospitality by the proprietor of the mosque, who offered us lokum (Turkish delight), Mevlana sekeri (this candy that comes from Konya), and lemon cologne, and also told us to please go upstairs and check the mosque out from that vantage point.

What an interesting vantage point it was – there we saw a woman who apparently had a very emotional experience. She yelled “Allah!” and ran towards Shems’ tomb, where she kneeled and it looked as if she were seizing. It was interesting because the women that were with her were trying to get her to stop and were almost laughing about the whole thing. Muammer told us that Mevlana (Rumi) would not approve of such an act because according to his teachings, one’s emotions are not supposed to govern their actions.

My favorite mosque of the day was the Alaaddin Mosque, which was very different from any mosque we have seen yet. First of all, it had a large opening to the side of the mosque instead of in front of the mihrab (which points towards Mecca). Also, it was full of columns and arches, and the columns were from ruins so they were all different. The tiles on the ceiling were also absolutely gorgeous.

We also went to Rumi’s tomb which also had a museum attached to it. The most interesting thing about Rumi’s tomb was the music that was playing – most sacred places that we have visited so far do not have music playing in them at all, but music was very important to Rumi and to the Sufi sect. Unlike Shems’ far less impressive tomb, we did not witness any extreme emotional experiences at Rumi’s tomb.
Rumi's tomb at night

After a short sleep, we headed to a traditional Turkish dinner with Muammer. Well, it was kind of traditional in that we did sit on the ground on cushions and ate at a low table, but we each ordered separate meals instead of having group dishes. It was absolutely delicious, and we learned more about Muammer. He married a German girl after directing her to her hotel in Konya about ten years ago. The best part – their common language is English and neither of them are native speakers. It was amazing to me that they have been able to build such a relationship despite the language barrier.

I have to mention one of the most interesting things about Konya –the extreme amounts of circumcision celebrations and weddings that we saw. There were so many processions with little boys dressed in their king outfits and cars all decked out in wedding decorations. They especially liked to drive around the traffic circle right next to our hotel honking their horns and banging on pots and pans. It was almost as loud as the call to prayer that basically went on inside our room at 5 AM.