Things to do
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Konya Archaeological Museum
The city's collection of prehistoric and classical material, including Roman sarcophagi and the finds from Çatalhöyük that stayed in Konya. It is small and sits beside the Sahib Ata complex.
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Alâeddin Mosque
The Seljuk sultans' mosque of 1220 on the artificial mound at the centre of the city, a forest of reused Roman columns under a flat wooden roof, with the tombs of eight sultans in the courtyard. The park around it is the city's front room.
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Çatalhöyük
A Neolithic town of the seventh millennium BC where houses were entered through the roof and the dead were buried under the floors, and one of the earliest large settlements known. Two excavation shelters are open and the site is otherwise a mound in a plain.
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İnce Minareli Medrese
A college of 1265 with a carved stone portal of exceptional depth, whose slender minaret lost its top to lightning in 1901 and kept the name anyway. It holds the stone and woodwork museum.
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Karatay Medrese
A theological college of 1251 whose dome is lined with the finest Seljuk tilework in Anatolia, now the city's tile museum. The star pattern in the dome is worth standing under for a while.
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Mevlâna Museum
The lodge of the whirling dervishes around the green-tiled tomb of Rumi, who died here in 1273, still visited as a shrine rather than as a museum by most of the people in it. Shoes come off and shoulders are covered.
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Sahib Ata Complex
A mosque, tomb and dervish lodge of the 1250s and 1280s built by a Seljuk vizier, with a brick and tile portal and a small foundation museum in the lodge. It is west of the centre and rarely busy.
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Sille
A Greek village in a gorge on the northwestern edge of the city, with a rock-cut church, a Byzantine basilica of Saint Helena still standing and Ottoman houses on both banks. It kept its Greek population until 1924.