Konya
— — the city Rumi chose to be buried in.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of the central Anatolian plateau and the home of Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet whose tomb sits beneath a turquoise-tiled fluted dome in the city centre. The shrine, the Mevlana Museum, draws several million visitors a year. Konya was the Seljuk capital in the 12th and 13th centuries, and a ring of mosques, madrasas, and the Alaeddin Hill at the centre still carry the weight of that period. The plateau around it runs flat and dry, with wheat fields to the horizon and Çatalhöyük an hour south.
Konya, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Konya is a city of the central Anatolian plateau in south-central Turkey, set at an elevation of about 1,016 metres. It is the seat of Konya Province and one of Turkey's larger cities, with a metropolitan population of around 2.3 million at the 2022 estimate. Under the Seljuks of Rûm in the 12th and 13th centuries, Konya served as the imperial capital, and much of the older city, including the Alaeddin Mosque on the central mound, dates from that period. The plateau around the city is flat, dry, and one of Turkey's main wheat-growing regions.
The Mevlana Museum at the centre of the city stands above the tomb of Jalaluddin Rumi, who died in Konya in 1273. The fluted dome over the tomb is sheathed in turquoise tile and is the building most readers picture when they picture Konya. The complex was the lodge of the Mevlevi Sufi order Rumi's followers founded, and houses his sarcophagus, his father's, and those of his close circle. It became a state museum in 1927 and now draws several million visitors a year, the most-visited museum in Turkey outside Istanbul.
Konya is easy to reach. The Ankara-Konya high-speed line opened in 2011 and runs trains to Ankara in roughly 1 hour 45 minutes, and on to Istanbul in about four hours by the same network. The airport at Konya runs domestic services. The Mevlana Museum sits at the city centre and is open daily; visitors remove shoes and cover their heads at the entrance to the tomb chamber. The annual Şeb-i Arûs, the commemoration of Rumi's death on 17 December, brings the largest crowds of the year and sema ceremonies in the city's halls.