Konya, in winter, with Rumi

Konya in February is not the warm hug of a Mediterranean weekend. The snow is on the steppe before you arrive. The buses pull in at a station that smells of diesel and tea. You walk into a city that observes the call to prayer the way most of Turkey does not anymore — fully, without ironic distance, as a daily rhythm. The Mevlana Museum is six hundred meters from any of the cheap hotels around the old bazaar. You go straight there. You stand under the green dome, by the carved sarcophagus, and you understand why people still come.