The courtyard, the şadırvan and the rose garden
Fountain 1512, courtyard arrangement sixteenth century, gardens replanted in the twentieth century
The whole complex began as a garden. When Rumi's father, the scholar Bahaeddin Veled, arrived in Konya in the twelve twenties, the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad gave him a rose garden outside the city walls as a place to teach, and it was in that garden that father and son were later buried. The courtyard you cross today, paved in stone and bright with roses in early summer, is the descendant of that gift, and the museum keeps the beds planted with old rose varieties in memory of it. Two small tombs stand in the garden, one of them for the flute players of the lodge, and lawns and cypresses fill the space between the outer walls and the main building.
At the centre of the court is the şadırvan, a marble ablution fountain with a stepped basin under a wooden canopy, from which water spills into a wide pool. It was a gift of Sultan Selim the First in 1512, and it served both for washing before prayer and as the gathering place of the dervishes; on summer evenings they would sit around it while the flutes played. The water still runs. Next to it a smaller basin called the Şeb-i Arus pool, the pool of the wedding night, recalls the name Rumi's followers give to the anniversary of his death, which they treat as the night of his union with God.
Take a moment here before you go in. From the courtyard you can see the whole sequence at once: the fountain, the row of dervish cells, the chimneys of the kitchen, the small domes of the mosque and semahane and the Green Dome above them all. The composition was never planned as a single design but grew over three centuries of gifts from sultans and emirs, and yet it hangs together as if it had been.
Did You Know? The site was a gift of roses before it was anything else, given by the Seljuk sultan to Rumi's father as a place to teach.
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