Tomb of Seyyid Burhaneddin

About this place

The man who taught Rumi lies here, in a public cemetery on the Talas road, under a dome that is not yet a century and a half old. Seyyid Burhaneddin Hüseyin Muhakkik-i Tirmizi had been a pupil of Rumi's father, Bahaeddin Veled, back in Balkh; after the father died in 1231 he followed the family to Konya and took the young Celaleddin in hand for roughly nine years, sending him to Damascus and Aleppo to study and putting him through a string of long retreats. Once he had licensed his pupil as a master he moved on to Kayseri, taught, led prayers, and died there around 1241 (some sources say 1244). Everything that followed, the Mesnevi and the whirling order, passed through this door first. For six and a half centuries the grave had no building to speak of. The present tomb went up in the early 1890s under Sultan Abdülhamid II, at the hands of Kayseri's district governor Mehmed Nazım Paşa with the backing of the Ankara governor Abidin Paşa (sources give 1892 or 1894). It is late Ottoman, not Seljuk: a central dome flanked by three iwans, an entrance on the north side, and above it a Persian inscription in the hand of Ali Emiri Efendi, the scholar and bibliophile whose private collection later became the core of Istanbul's Millet Library. Inside it is plain: a green-draped cenotaph, a few Qurans, and carpet enough for a handful of people to pray. Here is the fact that decides the visit: this is a shrine, not a museum. No ticket, no explanatory panels, nothing to look at in the touristic sense for more than ten minutes. People come to recite the Fatiha at the grave of Rumi's teacher and to sit for a moment with the contrast between this quiet Kayseri cemetery and the grand Konya mausoleum that draws millions. Locals come in numbers on Friday afternoons and on the eve of the two Eids; for quiet, come on an ordinary weekday morning. Shoes off at the door, headscarf for women, and bear in mind that the surrounding cemetery is a working one, full of people visiting their own dead. The tomb sits about a kilometre and a half south-east of Cumhuriyet Square, a 15-20 minute walk or five minutes by taxi, and combines naturally with the Seljuk Döner Kümbet a few hundred metres away on the same road. Cemetery paths are level and pushchair-friendly, and a visit with children is short and painless. In summer the cemetery trees give only patchy shade; in winter Kayseri is under snow and the stone paths turn slick, so watch your footing.