Aya Elenia church
A church dated by tradition to 327, with a Turkish-in-Greek-letters inscription over the door, restored and free to enter.
Dosseman — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Penaber49 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dosseman — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dosseman — CC BY-SA 4.0
About eight kilometres northwest of central Konya, ten by road from the Mevlana shrine, a narrow valley opens up with warm-grey stone houses stacked along both sides and, at its heart, a church said to have stood since the year 327. This is Sille: for the best part of two thousand years a halt for Christian pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, and one of the last villages in the region whose Greek Orthodox people still spoke a Greek dialect of their own, right up to the population exchange of 1923. They left for Greece; their houses and churches stayed behind to tell the story. Around 1,200 people live here now, and the village's three small museums logged more than 300,000 visits in 2025, most of them from Konya itself. The main sight is Aya Elenia, formally the Church of the Archangel Michael, which tradition credits to Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine. Above the door is an 1833 repair inscription in Turkish written with Greek letters, the strange script of the Karamanlides. Selçuklu Municipality restored it and opened it as a free museum at the end of 2012, and the interior earns the walk in: a dome, a wooden iconostasis, painted walls, and lion-headed stone water spouts on the facade. In the volcanic cliffs above the village are dozens of caves and rock-cut chapels in varying states of repair; down in the village are a Time Museum of old clocks and calendars inside a small former chapel by the cemetery, the Sille Museum of village life, and the Ottoman Çay Mosque on the stream bank. One thing to know before you go: Sille is not a finished museum village. Many of the original houses are crumbling despite restoration, and what gleams is the main street with its cafes, pottery workshops and Sille carpets dyed with the cehri plant. Three hours is plenty. Everything is on stone and gentle slopes, so a pushchair copes with the main street but not the caves. Weekends fill up with Konya families and the museums shut on Mondays, so a Tuesday-to-Friday morning gives you quiet and an open church. Getting there is easy: line 64 buses (64A and 64B) leave central Konya near Alaeddin Hill every twenty to thirty minutes and take half an hour, or a taxi does it in roughly fifteen. Drivers find parking at the village entrance, and about five hundred metres upstream is the small dam lake where Konya locals end their outing. In August the heat is dry at 1,100 metres and evenings are pleasant; in winter snow covers the valley and some cafes shut.
A church dated by tradition to 327, with a Turkish-in-Greek-letters inscription over the door, restored and free to enter.
Dozens of caves and chapels cut into the volcanic cliffs, and old clocks displayed in a small former chapel.
Stone houses, cafes and pottery along the stream, with a small picnic lake five hundred metres upstream.
Sille Mahallesi, Selçuklu, Konya 42240
No, give a single day to the Mevlana shrine and the Karatay and İnce Minare museums in the centre. Sille is a half-day for anyone staying two nights, or for a quiet walk and a streamside cafe on a weekday afternoon.
The main street, the cafes and the dam lake, yes; the caves and rock chapels mean a climb on an earth-and-stone slope where a pushchair is useless. The church itself is at ground level and easy.
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