Today I met up with my friend August to walk around Ulus, the old part of Ankara. After a bit of wandering, we found the Haci Bayram mosque, one of the oldest and most revered mosques in the city. Haci Bayram was a Muslim mystic who founded a dervish order centered in Ankara in the 15th century. Unfortunately, my lack of understanding of Islamic mysticism prevents me from going into much detail, but basically, dervishes were orders of mystics who had certain rituals or beliefs in addition to the teachings of the Koran. Westerners are most familiar with the whirling variety, but that's actually only one dervish order, the Mevlevi (followers of Mevlana, aka Rumi), who were originally based in Konya.

(Note: It's hard to tell if you don't know how Turkish is read, but the word haci = the more familiar hadji, a person who has gone on the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.)

Anyway, this mosque is very pretty and also houses Haci Bayram's tomb. August and I decided that since there were plenty of tourists (albeit all Turkish ones) there, it would be ok for us to be touristy and go in, too. We only had one head scarf between us, so I took it first, donned it, yanked down my knee-length skirt a little to make it cover more leg, took off my shoes and prepared to go in.

Just as I was about to hand August my purse to hold, an obviously religious middle-aged woman coming out of the mosque came up to me, put her hands on my shoulders, kissed my cheeks and said (in Turkish): "Thank you! Thank you so much, my dear! My good girl!" Apparently she was overwhelmed that a foreigner and apparent non-Muslim would cover her hair to go into a mosque. Unfortunately, I was rendered speechless by this display, so the woman didn't even have any way of knowing that I understood what she was saying. Still, August and I agreed that it pretty much made our day.