Dervish Shrine

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This is the Shrine to the founder of the Whirling Dervishes, in Konya. There are no actual dervishes there, but we did see all sorts of Qorans, and several tombs, and Jershon decided that the Dervish "cells" were bigger than his room.

However, before that we spent quite a long time people-watching, because it turned out that on Mondays, the Shrine was free to local people, and it was thronged -- people flowing though in avalanches all morning. Which was fine, except that in order to go inside, buth men and women had to be covered, which meant no shorts, and Art had worn shorts. They are supposed to have a sort of Sarong-like cover for such a case, but the crowds meant that none were available, and Art ended up walking back to the bus (outside of the old city) with our guide to change into long pants! So while he did that, Jershon and Silmarien and I waited at the inner entance, and I snapped a lot of pictures (normally I don't take pictures without asking, but these were sort of crowd shots). There is an older couple in one of the pictures -- as it turned out, I helped them get into the plastic booties which they were having a hard time manipulating.

After the shrine, we went shopping at the Covered Bazaar (see next entry) then sat on the steps of the Mosque to wait for the rest of our group. The first picture of the mosque is the women's entrance -- the sign which you can't quite read sayss "entrance belonging to women". The last picture is the steps, which were cool and shady and seemed to be the gathering place for everyyone in town.

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