The Tomb at Konya

Primary source

• T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, Konya Türk Tasavvuf Müziği Topluluğu Müdürlüğü, official ministry site (konyattmtopluluk.ktb.gov.tr), Institutional pages of the ensemble, hosted on the ministry's ktb.gov.tr domain.That the ensemble which performs Mevlevi sema in Konya, including the December Şeb-i Arûs programme, is a directorate of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism — the turning is done by state employees while the order that devised it remains dissolved. This is the source for the last sentence of the Shadow.
• Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Tekke ve Zaviyelerle Türbelerin Seddine ve Türbedarlıklar ile Bir Takım Unvanların Men ve İlgasına Dair Kanun (Law no. 677), 1925, Adopted 30 November 1925 (30 Teşrinisani 1341); published in the Resmî Gazete no. 243, 13 December 1925; Düstur 3/7/113. Articles 1-3, and the consolidated text published by the Turkish government at mevzuat.gov.tr (1.3.677), which records the amendments made by Law 5438 of 10 June 1949 and the paragraph added by Law 5566 of 1 March 1950, art. 1, as amended by Law 3612 of 7 February 1990, art. 5.The legal instrument itself: the closing of all tekkes and zaviyes, the closing of the tombs of sultans and the shrines of dervishes, the abolition of the office of tomb-keeper (türbedarlık) named in the law's own title, the prohibition of the dervish titles and garments, and a penalty of not less than three months' imprisonment and a fine for reopening a closed lodge, hospice or shrine. And, from the consolidated text, that the law stands amended but unrepealed: penalties raised in 1949, and a paragraph added in 1950 and amended in 1990 providing that those tombs belonging to great Turks and those of great artistic value may be opened to the public by the Ministry of Culture — the same statute reopening what it closed.
• Republic of Türkiye, Constitution of the Republic of Turkey (1982), Article 174, 'Preservation of Reform Laws', 1982, Article 174, which lists among the Reform Laws 'Act No. 677 of 30 November 1341 (1925)'; English text published by the TBMM.That Law 677 was in force when the 1982 Constitution was adopted and is shielded from constitutional challenge: Article 174 lists it third among the eight Reform Laws — 'Act no. 677 of 30 Teşrinisani 1341 on the Closure of Dervish Lodges and Zâviyes and the Prohibition and Abolition of the Office of Tomb-Keeper and Certain Titles' — and provides that no provision of the Constitution may be construed or interpreted as rendering those laws unconstitutional. That it has never since been repealed is carried by its own consolidated text, not by this article.
• UNESCO, Mevlevi Sema Ceremony, Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2008, Proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005; inscribed on the Representative List in 2008. Element description and safeguarding notes.UNESCO's own record that all mevlevihane were closed in 1925 as a result of secularisation policies, that the government began to allow performances again in public in the 1950s with restrictions easing further in the 1990s, and that many sema ceremonies are no longer performed in their traditional context but for tourist audiences, shortened and simplified to meet commercial requirements.

Scholarship

• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 1975, Chapter 5, 'Sufi Orders and Fraternities', p. 240; index s.v. ʿUrs.That ʿurs, 'wedding', is the general Sufi term for the anniversary of a saint's death, observed by orders alongside the mawlid — so the Turkish Şeb-i Arûs applies to Rumi the ordinary vocabulary of saint veneration rather than a name coined for him.
• Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teaching and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, 2000, Oxford: Oneworld, 2000 (revised edition 2008). Chapter 5 'From Sun to Son', section 'The Successors of Shams', pp. 223-5; chapter 10 'The Mevlevi Order', sections 'The Shrine in Konya', pp. 427-32, and 'Republican Repression and Mevlevi Resurgence', pp. 464-6; and p. 522 for Turkish Mevlevis not being permitted to turn in the shrine's own samāʿ hall. Page numbers follow the 2000 edition.Rumi's death at sunset on Sunday 17 December 1273 (5 Jumādā II 672) and the burial procession, reported from Sepahsālār and Aflākī, in which Christians, Jews, Greeks, Arabs and Turks joined, reading from the Psalms, the Torah and the Gospels. That ʿAlam al-Dīn Qayṣar approached Sultan Walad about erecting the Green Dome (Qobbat al-khaḍrā), for which he required the sum of 30,000 dirhams; that the wife of Muʿīn al-Dīn Parvāne collected several times that amount (Af 792); that construction was begun under the supervision of Badr al-Dīn Tabrīzī — Lewis gives no year for it; and that an elaborately carved walnut sarcophagus was prepared, probably by ʿAbd al-Vāḥed b. Salīm, inscribed with Rumi's own ghazal (D 911) beginning 'On the day I die, as they bear aloft my bier' and telling mourners not to weep; D followed by a number is a ghazal in Furūzānfar's Kolliyāt-e Shams (Tehran, 1957-67). The description of the shrine as it stands: bodies interred in an underground crypt rather than in the cenotaphs above — about three dozen for members of Rumi's family and close associates, over fifty in all, not all of them identified — some of which have been moved since the shrine became a museum in the 1920s; a marble cenotaph for Rumi in the centre with Sultan Walad's beside it under one gold-embroidered brocade donated by Sultan Abdülhamid; the silver railing given by Hasan Pasha in 1599. Also (pp. 429 and 486) that the conical green-tiled dome stands at the back of the room over the carved wooden cenotaph of Rumi's father Bahāʾ al-Dīn, perhaps originally designed for Rumi, the marble sarcophagus over Rumi's own grave having been erected by Süleyman, at which point the wooden one was moved over his father's grave (GM 201). That the shrine was transformed into the Konya Mevlana Museum after the closing of the dervish lodges in 1925 and continues to open to tourists and pilgrims; that its visitors are mostly Turkish Muslims who come on pilgrimage to read the Qurʾan and pray for health, wealth and children as at any saint's tomb, that it is the mainstay of the Konya tourist industry, and that a calligraphic verse in the entry cubicle calls the place the Kaaba of the lovers where whoever comes lacking finds completion. The text of Law 677, translated in full, closing all Sufi hospices, closing the shrines of dervishes, voiding the occupation of shrine custodian, forbidding the titles shaykh, dervish, dede and chelebi, and imposing at least three months' imprisonment for reopening a closed lodge or shrine; Lewis dates its ratification by parliament to 13 December 1925. That two years later, in the winter of 1927, Atatürk made an exception for the Mevlevis and allowed the shrine to reopen as a museum funded by the Ministry of Vakıfs; that Sadettin Heper, formerly head of the drummers at the Yenikapı Mevlevi lodge in Istanbul when it closed in 1925, approached the mayor of Konya in 1953 and obtained permission for the samāʿ to be performed publicly on the stipulation that it be construed as a celebration of a great Turkish poet rather than a religious ritual, though he insisted the Qurʾan be recited; that in December 1953 the first authorised Mevlevi samāʿ in almost three decades took place in a cinema in Konya with three musicians and two people turning in street clothes; that it was repeated in 1954 and advertised by the Tourist Association of Konya in 1955. That for UNESCO's Year of Rumi in 1973 the samāʿ was performed in the gymnasium of a Konya high school, a site chosen by the government in preference to the shrine to ensure the ceremony be perceived as cultural or even athletic rather than sacred. That Turkish Mevlevis had not been allowed to use the shrine's samāʿ hall for purely meditative turning in decades (p. 522, describing the position as of 2000). Official Turkish statistics for 1985: 477,290 Turkish and 100,105 foreign visitors. And the phrase shab-e ʿarūs for the December commemoration of Rumi's death.
• Haşim Karpuz, 'Mevlânâ Müzesi', TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2004, Vol. 29 (Ankara, 2004), pp. 452-4. The building history is given in the same volume's Mevlânâ articles, the companion article on the külliye covering the fabric.The museum's documentary history: the lodge closed in 1925 with the tekkes and zaviyes; inspections by Halil Ethem, director of the Istanbul Museums, and the library inspector Hamit Zübeyr, after which conversion to a museum was judged appropriate on 1 September 1926; formal opening on 2 March 1927 under the name Mevlevî Dergâhı Konya Âsâr-ı Atîka Müzesi; the removal of the archaeological material to the İplikçi Mosque in 1953 and the adoption of the name Mevlânâ Müzesi the following year; and the institution's description of itself as arranged as a 'living museum'. This is also the entry's source for the date of the tomb — a türbe built over the grave in 673/1274 at the charge of Muʿīnüddin Süleyman Pervâne, his wife Gürcü Hatun and Alemüddin Kayser, by Bedreddin-i Tebrîzî — and for its present form dating from the reign of Karamanoğlu Alâeddin Ali Bey (1361-98).

The tradition itself

• Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad-e Aflākī, Manāqib al-ʿārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1959, 1961); trans. John O'Kane as The Feats of the Knowers of God (Brill, 2002), 1353, The account of the raising of the Green Dome, Af 792 in Yazıcı's edition. Begun in 1318, as Aflākī says in his introduction, and given its final form in the 1350s; he died on 15 June 1360. Cited here at second hand through Lewis — neither the edition nor the translation was consulted.The order's own account of how its shrine came to be built: ʿAlam al-Dīn Qayṣar's approach to Sultan Walad, the thirty thousand dirhams at which the work was costed, the several times larger sum collected by the Pervâne's wife, and the supervision of the building by Badr al-Dīn of Tabriz. Cited as hagiography composed two generations after the events, not as a building record, and not as the source of the 1274 date, which Aflākī does not give.

Further reading

• 'Türkiye's Mevlana Museum draws record 3M visitors in 2024', Daily Sabah, 2025, 8 January 2025, quoting Mehmet Yünden, deputy provincial director of culture and tourism.Ministry of Culture and Tourism figures: 3,048,055 visitors in 2024 against 2,918,280 in 2023, and the claim that the museum ranks first among museums affiliated with the ministry.

Linked entries

• Set againstOut Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and RightdoingAttested

  The lines most quoted as Rumi's in English are Coleman Barks's 1984 version of quatrain 395; the lines actually carved for the grave in 1274 are his own, and they instruct the mourners standing there.

• Derives fromSultan WaladTraditional

  Aflākī has ʿAlam al-Dīn Qayṣar come to Rumi's son for leave to raise the dome, at a cost he put at thirty thousand dirhams; the lodge that grew round the grave became the order Sultan Walad, not Rumi, actually built.

• Transmitted intoThe Dīvān-e Shams-e TabrīzīAttested

  The walnut sarcophagus carved for the grave in 1274 was inscribed with one of his own ghazals — 911 in Furūzānfar's numbering — which opens on the day of his death and tells the mourners not to weep.

• Set againstThe Song of the ReedTraditional

  The Masnavi opens with the reed cut from the reed bed and crying of separation; the night of his death is called Şeb-i Arûs, the wedding — ʿurs being, as Schimmel notes, the ordinary Sufi word for any saint's death anniversary.

• Set againstReynold A. NicholsonAttested

  The oldest manuscript of the poem was copied at Konya in 1278, five years after Rumi's death, and is kept there. Nicholson worked from a copy of it in Cambridge and, on Gamard's account, never visited or lived in a Middle Eastern country, holding that the distance made him the more objective scholar.

• VeneratesSultan WaladAttested

  Aflākī says he came to rest beside his father in the shrine, and Gölpınarlı found no separate stone there — Rumi's marble sepulchre stands over both graves.

• VeneratesThe Song of the ReedTraditional

  Aflākī already attributes the account of the poem's origin to a Masnavi-reciter attached to the tomb, so recitation there is as old as the hagiography itself.

• PractisesSamāʿAttested

  The lodge beside Rūmī's tomb was closed with every other in Turkey in 1925 and reopened as a museum; from the 1950s the state permitted the ceremony there again, as public performance.

• PractisesThe Mevlevi SemâAttested

  Law 677 closed the lodge beside the grave along with every other in 1925; the December turning is now staged across Konya by a state ensemble, not in the shrine's own semahane.