The Semahane
Sixteenth century, reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
Turn left from the tomb hall and you enter a square room under a wide dome, with a wooden gallery running around the upper wall and a floor once polished smooth by turning feet. This is the semahane, the hall built for the sema, the whirling ceremony of the Mevlevi dervishes. Here, on ceremonial nights, the sheikh would sit on his red sheepskin, the musicians would play from the gallery above, and the dervishes in their tall felt hats and white skirts would spin slowly with one palm turned up to heaven and the other down to earth.
The hall and the small mosque beside it were added in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, when the lodge received generous Ottoman support. The dome is painted, the windows are set high to give an even light, and the musicians' balcony, the mutrip, is worth noticing since the music of the sema, with its reed flute, kettle drums and voices, was as important as the dance. The hall now displays what the dervishes used: reed flutes called ney, kudum drums, the great Seljuk and Ottoman carpets that covered the floor, dervish clothing and the embroidered covers that once lay over the tombs. Look also for the wooden lattice screen that separated the women's gallery.
The sema was banned along with the lodges in 1925 and returned in the nineteen fifties as a cultural performance. It is no longer danced in this room, which is too small and too fragile for crowds, but the ceremony you may see at the Mevlana Cultural Centre in December follows the pattern set here. Rumi himself is said to have whirled spontaneously in the streets and markets of Konya, and the ceremony grew out of that ecstatic movement, given form and music by his son and successors.
Did You Know? The whirling ceremony was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
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