Galata Mevlevi Lodge has turned dervishes on its floor since 1491, the oldest surviving Mevlevi house in the city. A high official of Sultan Bayezid II granted the land, and the lodge grew into a center of worship, poetry, and music for the followers of Rumi. Fire took the buildings more than once; the octagonal semahane was raised again in the late eighteenth century, in the years the poet Şeyh Galib led the lodge, and renewed by later sultans.
You enter from Galip Dede Street, a lane of shops selling reed flutes and hand drums, named for that same poet-sheikh. Inside, the wooden semahane rises to a low gallery where musicians once played the ney, the reed whose breathy voice opens Rumi's Mesnevi. The dervish lodges were closed in 1925, and this one reopened half a century later as a museum, its manuscripts and instruments set behind glass. Turbaned tombstones crowd the shaded courtyard outside. On certain evenings the whirling ceremony still fills the hall, black cloaks dropping and white skirts lifting into a slow circle.