Konya

i.The Plain at the Centre of the Anatolian Plateau

Konya sits in the very heart of the Anatolian plateau, two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Ankara, at an elevation of just over a thousand metres. It is not a city of mountains, though mountains frame its far horizon; it is a city of the plain. The steppe spreads around it in every direction — a wide, quiet country of wheat fields and irrigation canals that, in spring, carries the sweet smell of almond and apricot blossom. To the south the Taurus range lifts the sky; to the west a vast salt lake catches the light on still afternoons. This is the country of the true interior, the high dry heart of Anatolia, where the wind reaches the city from four directions and the horizons are long.

The plain that holds Konya has been continuously inhabited for longer than any other place in Anatolia — longer, in fact, than almost anywhere on earth. The settlement mounds rise out of the fields, their great piles of accumulated mud recording the lives of peoples whose names, often enough, are lost: Hittites and Phrygians, Greeks and Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Seljuks, Ottomans. Each layer speaks, if you know how to listen. The city itself — the Konya that stands today as the capital of a province and a regional centre — is perhaps two hundred years old in its modern form. But underneath it, older than Christianity, older than the cities of Greece, older than Abraham, there are other cities.

The plain at the centre of Anatolia, where the oldest settlements on earth still hold the memory of their first inhabitants.

ii.Çatalhöyük and the Neolithic Dawn

Thirty kilometres south of the city centre, near the small town of Cumra, lies Çatalhöyük — the most extensively excavated Neolithic settlement in the world and, since 2012, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The site is a vast mound formed from the accumulated remains of a settlement that was occupied, with almost no interruption, from around 7100 to 5700 BCE — more than fifteen hundred years of continuous habitation in the Neolithic period. At its height, perhaps eight thousand people lived here, in a dense cluster of mudbrick houses built so close to one another that there were no streets; access to houses was from the roof, and the walls of one structure formed the wall of its neighbour.

What gives Çatalhöyük its significance is not that agriculture was invented here — the domestication of grain and animals had already taken root in the Levant centuries before — but rather that it is the largest and best-preserved window we have into how the first settled urban societies actually lived. The houses contain artifacts that tell a story: obsidian mirrors, bone tools, clay figurines of animals and people. The walls are decorated with frescoes and geometric patterns. Burials were made beneath the houses. In room after room, archaeologists have found the remains of feasts, the evidence of craft specialization, the tools of traders. Here, in this mound on the Anatolian plateau, the human journey from nomadic hunting to settled, cooperative, specialized life is written in clay and bone.

The nearby mound of Alâeddin Hill, which rises at the centre of modern Konya, shows a different kind of continuity. It was first settled around 9000 BCE and remained occupied through the Chalcolithic period and into the Bronze Age. The layers tell a story not of a single revolutionary moment but of a slow accumulation of ways of living — each civilization leaving its mark and moving on, each layer another chapter in the same conversation that Çatalhöyük opened.

iii.Iconium in the Classical World

By the time writing arrived in Anatolia, Konya was already ancient. The Greeks called it Iconium — a name that, transliterated from earlier Hittite and Phrygian forms, preserved some echo of what the people of the place themselves called it. The Phrygians, who dominated central Anatolia after the Bronze Age collapse, had a city here called Kavania. It stood on Alâeddin Hill, defended by walls. The Phrygians gave way to the Lydians, and the Lydians to the Persians, and the Persians to Alexander.

Alexander passed through in 333 BCE on his way to greater victories, and Iconium became, briefly, part of his empire. After his death, the city fell to the Seleucids, then to the kingdom of Pergamon, and finally — in 133 BCE — to Rome. Under Rome and the Byzantine East, Iconium remained a prosperous provincial city, a centre of trade on the roads that connected the Aegean coast to the high plains of Syria. It was here, very likely, that the apostle Paul came in the first century, preaching in the market and the synagogue, and winning converts who are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles — "Jews and God-fearers" of Iconium who believed.

The city was Christian by the time of Constantine, and remained so. Sille, eight kilometres north-west of Konya, preserves the rock churches and monasteries of the Byzantine period — small, intimate chambers carved into the soft limestone, their walls covered in frescoes, their niches shaped to hold lamps and icons. These were the places where the Christian community of Iconium gathered and prayed in the centuries when Anatolia was the heartland of the Eastern Church, before the Arab raids came and the frontier moved elsewhere.

iv.Konya Under Byzantine Rule

In the seventh and eighth centuries, Konya — still called Iconium by the Byzantines who held it — endured the Arab raids that swept across the plateau. The city was attacked, sometimes captured, sometimes recovered, but it held. It remained Christian, it remained Byzantine, and it remained prosperous enough that the empire considered it worth defending.

Byzantine Iconium was a military outpost and a trade centre, fortified on Alâeddin Hill, with a garrison and an administration. The city had a bishop, a marketplace, a water supply brought from distant springs. The high plateau was not the richest part of the Byzantine empire, but it was part of it, and Iconium was its capital. The roads that once carried Alexander's armies now carried Byzantine merchants and soldiers, pilgrims and officials, all moving through the same landscape that had held the city since 7000 BCE.

v.The Anatolian Seljuk Capital (1097–1307): The Heart of the Empire

In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert near Lake Van, the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes. The battle opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement, and it set in motion the transformation of the plateau from a Byzantine frontier to a Turkish homeland. Within fifteen years, the Seljuk sultans had conquered much of the interior. They chose to make their capital not in some coastal city, but in the high interior — on the plateau where the great mound of Çatalhöyük still stood silent under wheat fields.

Süleyman ibn Qutalmish, the founder of what would become known as the Sultanate of Rûm — the Sultanate of Rome, preserving in its name the memory of the empire it had conquered — established his first capital at İznik (Nicaea) around 1077. But in 1097, when the First Crusade recaptured İznik, the Seljuk court moved eastward to Konya. For the next two hundred and ten years — from 1097 until 1307 — Konya was the capital of the greatest Turkish sultanate in medieval Anatolia, the centre from which Seljuk sultans ruled lands that stretched from the Aegean to the mountains of Armenia.

The Seljuk period is Konya's golden age. Under sultans like Mesud I, Kılıç Arslan II, and Kılıç Arslan III, and above all under Alâeddin Keykubâd I (reigned 1219–1237), the city became one of the great cultural centres of the medieval Islamic world. Persian was the language of the court and of high culture; Arabic was the language of religious learning; Turkish was spoken in the streets and among the soldiers. Silk Road merchants brought goods from China and India. Artisans came from Persia and Syria. Scholars arrived from Baghdad and the Levant. The city was walled, expanded, rebuilt in stone. Markets were established. A university of scholars gathered. The population swelled to perhaps one hundred thousand in the city's most prosperous years — enormous for medieval Anatolia.

The architecture of Seljuk Konya still stands. On Alâeddin Hill rises the Alâeddin Mosque (1220), its simple grace unmistakable across the square; inside, marble columns and a vaulted ceiling speak of the sultan's generosity to God. The Karatay Madrasa (1251), now housing the Museum of Seljuk Tiles, displays a dome of geometric tile-work of such intricate perfection that it seems to contain the mathematics of the universe. The İnce Minareli Madrasa (1265), the "Madrasa with the Slender Minaret," stands with its monumental portal still visible across the city. The Sırçalı Madrasa, the Sahip Ata complex, the great hans and caravanserais built to shelter merchants and pilgrims — these are not the remains of a struggling frontier power, but the monuments of an empire in its confidence.

A single event marks the military apogee of Seljuk power: the Battle of Myriokephalon (1176), fought at Bağırsak Boğazı (Bağırsak Pass) near Beyşehir, south-west of Konya. Here Sultan Kılıç Arslan II defeated the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos in a devastating victory. It was the moment when the Byzantine empire had to accept that Anatolia would not be recovered, that Turkish rule was here to stay, that the old empire's eastern frontier was gone forever. The city celebrates this triumph each year with the commemoration of the Myriokephalon victory.

The Seljuk sultans chose the high plateau as their capital, and filled it with buildings whose grace still startles: the precision of the tile dome, the generosity of the stones.

But Konya's dominion did not last forever. In 1243, at the Battle of Köse Dağ near Kayseri, the Seljuk sultan Kılıç Arslan IV was defeated by a Mongol force sent by the Ilkhanate. The Seljuks remained sultans in Konya for another sixty years, but they ruled under Mongol overlordship. The great age was ending. The last Seljuk Sultan of Rûm, Mesud III, died in 1308, and the sultanate broke into fragments — beyliks (principalities) ruled by Turkish families who fought one another for power and territory. Konya passed to the Karamanoğulları, the Karamanids, who would hold it until the Ottoman conquest.

vi.Konya's Golden Age: The Sufi Flowering

The thirteenth century was not only the age of military triumph; it was also the age when Konya became a centre of Islamic spirituality that would have echoes rippling across centuries and continents. It was in this same city, in this same period, that the great Sufi tradition came to its fullest flowering on the Anatolian plateau.

Bahaeddin Veled (Baha al-Din Walad) — called the Sultân al-Ulema, "Sultan of the Scholars" — came to Konya in 1228 at the invitation of Sultan Alâeddin Keykubâd. He brought with him his young son, who would become known to the world as Mevlana Celaleddin (Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi). Bahaeddin taught and wrote; his son became a teacher of Islamic law and theology, and then something far greater. For the full story of Mevlana and his transformation into a poet of divine love — the master of the Mesnevî, the founder of the Mevlevî order, the saint buried in Konya whose December feast of the Şeb-i Arûs draws two million pilgrims a year — see the dedicated essay at this site.

But Mevlana was not alone. Around him gathered other great figures of Islamic learning. Sadr al-Din Qunawi (Sadreddin-i Konevî, 1207–1274), the great follower of Ibn Arabi, lived and taught in Konya, developing the philosophical theology that would dominate Sufism for centuries. Ibn Arabi himself — the greatest metaphysical thinker of medieval Islam — lived in Konya for a time. Poets, jurists, mystics, mathematicians, physicians: the city drew them as though by some central force. The archive of medieval Konya Islam shows a community in which Persian and Arabic learning met Turkish practicality, where the rigorous study of law coexisted with the ecstatic practice of the mystical path, where the court sponsored scholarship and the universities taught the learning of the age.

This was Konya's "altın çağ" — its golden age — and it was the gift of the Seljuks. The sultans patronized learning, commissioned buildings, welcomed scholars. The scholars produced works that would outlast empires. And from this combination, in this city, there emerged a spiritual flowering the like of which was rare in any age: a moment when a whole society seemed to align toward the pursuit of divine knowledge, and when the greatest minds of the Islamic world gathered in one place.

vii.The Karamanid Period and Ottoman Transition (1277–1465)

When the last Seljuk sultanate fragmented after the Mongol victory, Konya fell under the control of the Karamanoğulları — the Karamans — one of the Turkish beyliks that emerged from the ashes of Seljuk power. The Karamans were warriors and administrators, less grandly learned than the Seljuks perhaps, but proud, skilled, and deeply resistant to the rising Ottoman power.

For nearly two centuries the Karamans held Konya and the surrounding region as an autonomous principality. They built, they patronized scholars and Sufis, they conducted diplomacy with the courts of the Mediterranean and the Balkans. But they were ultimately outmatched. In 1465, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II — Mehmed the Conqueror — brought the Karamans under Ottoman control, and Konya became an Ottoman city.

viii.Konya Under Ottoman Rule (1465–1923)

Mehmed II recognized Konya's strategic and cultural importance. He made it the capital of the Karaman Eyalet (province), established in 1470 as the fourth great eyalet of the Ottoman empire after Rumelia, Anadolu, and Rûm. The Karaman Eyalet at its height stretched across more than eighty thousand square kilometres of central and southern Anatolia — a vast territory that would remain the heart of Ottoman provincial administration for more than four centuries.

Konya became a centre of Ottoman military power. The sultans passed through on their eastern campaigns: Selim I, Süleyman the Magnificent, and other great rulers stopped here, rested their armies, and used the city as a base for operations against the Safavid Persians and the eastern frontier. Selim I took special interest in Konya, particularly in its most famous shrine, the Mevlana Dergâhı — the Mevlana lodge and tomb. He ordered repairs and improvements; he brought water to the city; he commissioned a new mosque.

The Ottoman city was prosperous. In 1898, the Anatolian Railway reached Konya, connecting it to Ankara and Istanbul, and transforming it into a node of modern commerce. The first newspaper was published in 1869; the first lise (high school) in 1889; a Faculty of Law in 1908. By 1900, there were 530 medreses across the Konya province. The Selimiye Mosque (Selimiye Câmii), the Yusufağa Library, the Aziziye Mosque — these late Ottoman structures continue the tradition of imperial patronage that the Seljuks had established.

The Ottoman period was a time of relative stability and slow growth. Konya was not Istanbul, not the centre of power. But it was a city of learning, of piety, of commerce, and of tradition. It was the place where the Seljuk legacy lived on in stone and in the memory of its inhabitants. And it was the home of the Mevlevî order, the Whirling Dervishes, whose presence in Konya — though the order itself was banned in 1925 — would come to define the city in the modern world.

ix.Republican Konya and Modern Life

In 1923, the Republic of Türkiye was founded, and Konya became, like all the cities of Anatolia, a city of the new nation-state. In 1925, the dervish lodges were closed by law, and the order went underground. But Konya remained the spiritual home of the Mevlevî tradition. When, in 1953 — after the transition to democracy — a single Sema ceremony was permitted each year in December, presented as a cultural rather than a religious event, it was performed in Konya, in the city that still held the shrine of the master.

Modern Konya is a sprawling city of perhaps four hundred thousand people, surrounded by one of Türkiye's great agricultural regions — the Konya plain is the wheat basket of central Anatolia. Selçuk University has become a centre of higher learning. The city has developed light industry, food processing, textile production. It has grown at the pace of Turkish cities in the post-war era: sprawling suburbs, new avenues, apartment blocks, shopping centres. It remains, statistically, one of the more religiously conservative cities in the country — the call to prayer is heard in every quarter, and the Friday prayers draw crowds.

But what draws the world to Konya is not modern commerce, but the past. Every December, the Şeb-i Arûs week brings pilgrims and tourists. The Mevlana Museum, housing the shrine of the saint and the ceremonial hall where the Sema is performed, receives nearly two million visitors annually — making it one of Türkiye's most-visited cultural sites. The Karatay Museum of Seljuk tiles, the Archaeological Museum with its treasures from Çatalhöyük, the underground Seljuk han (inn) that still stands hidden beneath the bazaar — these are the places that define Konya in the experience of most visitors. The city is, as the Turks say, an "open-air museum" — a place where every layer of history is visible, from the Neolithic mound to the Ottoman minaret to the modern avenue.

x.Visiting Konya Today

Konya is reached by high-speed train from Ankara (about one hour forty-five minutes) or Istanbul (about four hours fifteen minutes). The airport at Konya serves regional flights; Ankara and Istanbul airports are the major hubs. The city centre is navigable on foot; most major museums are within walking distance of the main square and the old city quarters.

The Mevlana Museum — the shrine and lodge of Mevlana — stands at the heart of the city and is the single most important site. A visit should be unhurried; the tomb chamber itself, under the famous turquoise tile dome, carries a spiritual weight that demands quiet. Outside, in the rose garden, pigeons gather around a fountain, and pilgrims stand in silence. The Sema ceremony is performed on Saturday evenings throughout much of the year at the Mevlana Cultural Centre; during Şeb-i Arûs week in December, the ceremonies are held twice or thrice nightly and are attended by thousands. Booking is essential.

The Karatay Madrasa, now the Museum of Seljuk Ceramics, houses an extraordinary collection of tile-work. The İnce Minareli Madrasa stands across the square, its great portal unmistakable. The Alâeddin Mosque and the remains of the Seljuk palace complex occupy Alâeddin Hill, where the view across the city reveals the long layers of history beneath the modern streets. The Sırçalı Madrasa and the Sahip Ata complex are nearby. For those with time, the journey out to Çatalhöyük, near Cumra, is essential — a visit to the actual excavation site, where the Neolithic houses still stand in their mounds, carries an immediacy that no museum can convey.

Konya's table is simpler than that of the Mediterranean coast, but substantial. The local specialty is tirit — a dish of bread soaked in yoghurt and topped with a meat sauce — simple, warming, and particular to the region. Etliekmek — pastry with meat inside — is eaten at breakfast or as a street food. The local sweets are rich with honey and pistachio. For recipes and a broader introduction to Anatolian tables, see the site's Anatolian Tables section.

xi.A City of Layers

Konya is a palimpsest, a place where each civilization writes over the one before, but the earlier writing is never quite erased. Walk the streets and you are walking on the bones of Phrygian Kavania, on the stones of Roman Iconium, on the foundations of Seljuk grandeur. The wheat fields surrounding the city hold Çatalhöyük, where the very idea of city, of settlement, of living together, was born. The shrine of Mevlana recalls the moment when love was preached as a path to God, when a man's whirling became prayer, when a death-day became a wedding night.

What holds all these layers together, what gives Konya its particular character across the centuries, is the plateau itself. The Anatolian plain does not shout; it speaks quietly, over long distances. The wind that blew across this plain fifteen thousand years ago still blows. The sun that rose over the same horizon at dawn when the first city-dwellers built their houses at Çatalhöyük still rises. The silence that falls across the steppe in the late afternoon is the same silence that fell then. In a city layered with so much history, there is something that endures beneath the layers — something in the land itself, in the space, in the quality of light. That is Konya's still point, the centre of the turning world.