Visiting the Seljuks

I slept with my door open last night (the hotel rooms are very warm and there are no sheets, just a duvet), and because we are right next to a mosque I was awakened quite early with the call to prayer.  After our incredible breakfast buffet we boarded the bus and set off for Konya.  The overwhelming majority of the day was then spent driving, as it takes about 5 hours from Pamukkale.  Our first rest-stop was in the town of Dinar, where I tried a special yogurt dish called Balli (I found out later it is often made from goat's milk, not sure about the one I tried).  The yogurt is strained so that it is very think, like Greek yogurt, and then they top it with honey and opium (poppy) seeds.

Although the seeds were brown, not black as I'm used to seeing them, it was a delicious treat.  You can find honey, and honeycomb, for sale in all sorts of varieties in most of the roadside stops we made.  On our drive we passed quite a few wind turbines and even a large solar panel farm.  We had some lovely snow-capped mountains to our right as we drove through a bunch of farming villages in the large valley.  You could sometimes see rows of women bent over, planting their spring crops in the fields.

For lunch we stopped in the town of Akşehir, known for the burial place of Nasreddin Hodja.  I had seen cartoon caricatures of Hodja on books in many of the shops (he's usually riding a donkey backwards), but none of the books were ever in English so I couldn't figure out the significance of this person.  It seems he was an imam and he became part of Turkish folklore because of his odd ways, funny stories, and witty sayings.

No, I still don't know why it's called "The City of Hearts"

After arriving in Konya we visited the Mevlâna Museum: the mausoleum of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian Sufi mystic, and also the home to the former lodge of the Whirling Dervishes.  Rumi is known to the Turks as Mevlana (the Sainted One), hence the name ofthe Museum.  I really didn't understand what we were seeing, or why, but I looked around anyway.

A stunning copy of the Quran done in 1544 by Rumi's daughter Fatima