The first thing to do in Konya is the Mevlâna Museum, the former lodge of the Mevlevi order, where Mevlâna is buried beneath the Green Dome. In the city centre are the Seljuk monuments of Alaaddin Hill and the tile-lined Karatay Medrese, now a museum of tiles, and Sille, a quarter of Konya strung along a narrow valley, keeps an old church and stone houses. Further out lie Lake Beyşehir with its wooden-columned mosque and a ruined Seljuk palace, Hittite monuments built over springs or cut into rock, Çatalhöyük, and the crater lake of Meke. Each sight below has its own guide on this site.
The Mevlâna Museum
The lodge has been a museum since 1926. For its first years it doubled as the Konya Museum of Antiquities, and only in 1954, once the archaeological collection had moved out, was it rearranged under the name Mevlâna Museum. The tomb proper is the Green Dome, standing on four thick piers, and the complex grew around it through later additions; several Ottoman sultans belonged to the Mevlevi order, which is why it was so carefully kept. A story recorded by Ahmed Eflaki has Mevlâna telling a sultan who wished to give his father a tomb that no building could outdo the dome of the sky.
Inside, look for Mevlâna's coffin, the Mesnevi, the April bowl and the cloth laid over his grave; the display follows his life from birth to death, and members of his family lie here with him. Selim I gave the garden its fountain, whose central basin is reputed to have come as a present from the Germiyanid emirate; the Rose Garden has enlarged the grounds from 6,500 to 18,000 square metres. The year 2023, the 750th anniversary of his death, was declared the Year of Mevlâna.
Close by, the War of Independence memorial stands between the museum and the Mevlâna Culture Centre and tells the story from Gallipoli to postwar Konya. About five hundred metres further on, the Panorama Konya Museum paints the city of the thirteenth century, including Mevlâna's sema in the covered market, and its courtyard holds twenty miniature Mevlevi lodges under a ring of seventeen domes.
Alaaddin Hill and the Seljuk buildings
On the hill, next to the Alâeddin Mosque, the Alâaddin Tomb Tower holds eight Seljuk sultans, Alâeddin Keykubad among them; Kılıç Arslan II had it built for the dynasty, and traces show that its upper part was once wholly tiled. The provincial directorate says no conical tomb tower in the country matches its quality and height. The two-storey Seljuk Pavilion beside it, from the reign of Kılıç Arslan II and later enlarged by Alaeddin Keykubad, had tiled walls and inscription bands, and it is described as an inspiration for the palaces at Bursa, Edirne and Topkapı, particularly their justice towers.
Facing the hill, the Karatay Medrese was built in 1251 by the emir Celaleddin Karatay and has been the Museum of Tile Works since 1955. Its own decoration is the main exhibit: a carved doorway of bluish and white marble, and a dome sheathed in turquoise, dark blue and black mosaic tile, with a lantern at the top and the names of prophets and caliphs on its supporting triangles. A good deal of wall tile has fallen away. The collection is built around tiles excavated at the Kubadabad palace, displayed with Seljuk, Beylik and Ottoman ceramics, and Karatay's own tomb is the domed cell beside the main iwan.
On Sahip Ata Caddesi, the vizier Sahib Ata Fahreddin Ali's complex of 1277 gathers a mosque, his family's tomb, a dervish lodge, which is the museum, and a double bath opposite. Beside it, the Konya Archaeological Museum moved into its present building in 1962, but its story starts in 1899, when it opened as a branch of the Imperial Museum; Turkish Wikipedia, the basis of our guide, calls it the first archaeological museum founded in Anatolia. Its Roman marble sarcophagi are the highlight, and Neolithic finds from Çatalhöyük are here too.
Among the smaller museums, the municipal Koyunoğlu City Museum mixes archaeology, coins, calligraphy and natural history with carpets, kilims and a 35,000-volume library; the Ethnography Museum is strongest on embroidered dress, silver jewellery and calligraphers' tools; the Atatürk House Museum, given to Atatürk by the people of Konya in 1928, covers the city's part in the War of Independence; and Selçuk University's museum has some 2,500 objects, Maya, Aztec and Inca pieces among them.
Sille
Sille, in the Selçuklu district, spreads across both slopes of a deep, narrow valley and has been protected as an urban conservation area since 2001. An early Christian centre and a halt on the pilgrim road from İstanbul to Jerusalem, it mixes churches with Seljuk and Ottoman mosques, baths, fountains and bridges, and the hills to its south hold about forty caves once used as churches or homes.
Its chief sight is Aya Elenia, also known as the church of the Archangel Michael. The inscription over the door credits Helena, Constantine's mother, with building it in 327 on her way to Jerusalem, and the municipality, citing a book by Ali Canip Olgunlu, calls it the oldest surviving church in the world. Inside are frescoes, a wooden iconostasis, ambo, bishop's throne and ciborium, and a repair inscription of 1833 in Turkish written with Greek letters. Sille also has two small museums: the Sille Museum, with local pottery, carpets and dress, and the Time Museum, in a chapel locally called the Milk Church, with sundials, astrolabes and clocks.
Beyşehir and its lake
Lake Beyşehir is protected by a national park of 88,750 hectares, set up in 1993; forest of juniper, pine, fir, cedar and oak reaches the shore in places, and grebes, swans, cormorants, herons and ducks breed on its islands. At Beyşehir, the Eşrefoğlu Mosque of 1296–1299, a hundred metres from the water, stands on more than forty wooden columns, with a six-metre tiled mihrab and a walnut minbar assembled without glue; since 2023 it has been on the World Heritage List with four other medieval wooden hypostyle mosques.
Kubadabad, on the lakeshore below the Anamas mountains, was built in 1236 for Alaeddin Keykubad, and its guide calls it the only Seljuk palace complex that survives. Only ruins remain on the site; its famous tiles of hunts and courtiers are in Konya's museums, chiefly the Karatay, so the two belong together. In spring, thousands of storks come to nest in the valley at Yeşildağ, thirty kilometres from Beyşehir.
Hittite monuments and Çatalhöyük
Eflatunpınar, 22 kilometres from Beyşehir, is a Hittite spring sanctuary of the late thirteenth century BC, assembled from fitted andesite blocks rather than carved from a cliff: a pool fed by channels, with gods and goddesses in relief above it. Near Fasıllar village a 72-tonne carved block made for the Hittite king Muwatalli lies on its side, showing two gods and a pair of lions, and a hundred metres to its east the Roman Lukyanus relief shows a horse beside a Greek inscription that sets rules for races in honour of a young cavalryman. At İvriz, near Halkapınar, an eighth-century BC relief by the spring shows the king Warpalavas praying to the god Tarhundas, who holds grapes and wheat.
Çatalhöyük, in Çumra district 52 kilometres southeast of the city, was settled from about 7000 BC and has been a World Heritage Site since 2012; its two mounds, and why it is counted among the oldest settlements, are the subject of our separate article on Çatalhöyük.
Further out: Meke, Obruk, Akşehir and Ereğli
Meke Lake in Karapınar is a crater lake of bitter water with islets in its caldera, called the Eye of Anatolia for its shape; the directorate reports that most of its birds have stopped coming. The Obruk caravanserai, standing since 1220 and now a museum hotel, shows Anatolian kitchen equipment and has a section of scents. Akşehir has three museums: archaeology, ethnography and Nasreddin Hoca in the Rüştü Bey mansion, stone works in Sahip Ata's medrese of 1250, and the Western Front Headquarters, where the Great Offensive was planned between 1921 and 1922. Ereğli's museum includes a mammoth fossil dug up in a sand quarry at Zengen.
