Konya is a medium sized city between the Cappadocia area and Antalya; it makes a good stopover if you want to split up a long bus trip to the Mediteranean coast.
It’s really famous for just one thing, the mausoleum of Rumi.
Konya has the largest Islamic population of anywhere in Turkey. It’s said that 99 percent of people living in Konya are Islamic.
Rumi was a poet and you can read his works here, but they are mostly written in Hebrew. He focused his work on people being accepting of other cultures and ideas. It is said that this can be see among Muslims in Turkey. Although all Muslims worship together, you often see some women fully covered so you can see just their eyes sitting next to other Muslim women casually wearing jeans. This idea of accepting others even though you do not necessarily agree with what they are doing or how they dress is supposed to have begun with Rumi.
Also the practice of Turkish dervish whirling started here. It’s a sort of active meditation technique or a worship dance. It sounds like it was a long process to train, apparently just over 1000 days of training.
