In a city in the northern region of Turkey called Kastamonu there is a türbe, a tomb, a shrine to a Sufi saint whose name is Sha`ban Veli. To get there we have to drive quite a ways through mountains. It must be a four hour trip from Ankara, which is in the middle of the country. When we got there, first we visited the tomb of Sha`ban Veli and then we went to the mosque in Kastamonu that he had originated. This mosque goes back, literally, hundreds and hundreds of yeart. This man was the founder of the Halveti order of Sufism. Khalwa is about a type of advanced communication between people where they disappear into each other, where the “I” sort of disintegrates.
This mosque had two stories. It had a balcony which was the second floor. The balcony was not a place for people to necessarily be during prayers. It served a different function. After prayers or after sema, because the Halveti also whirled, they would go up to this balcony and on the balcony there was a series of doors running in a semicircle around the entire length of the balcony. If you opened one of these doors they were like large or small, depending on what you consider large, what you consider small, closets. Each of these rooms was approximately the size of a grave. After sema or after prayer, the members of the tariqat, the order, would go into these rooms, close the doors and sit in silence and continue their prayer and meditation.
They were already separated from the outside world by the mosque. They were already separated from the outside world by way of their tariqat, their group. Why did they need this extra separation? Why did they need to go into a grave-like situation in order to continue their meditation?
In Ankara there is a türbe, a tomb, a resting place, a shrine, a burial place, of a great Sufi whose name is Haji Bayram. Attached to the area where his türbe is, is a mosque. If you know people there and they are inclined to show you, they will take you down a few steps below the mosque to a door which leads down into an underground area that you go into. It’s dark, it’s dank, and it’s empty. The story is that Haji Bayram spent at least forty days in that underground cavern, being feed very little during that period of time. In the middle of Istanbul there is a shrine (türbe, resting place) of a great shaikh who is known as Merkez Efendi. If you visit that shrine and if you are there with people who know their way around and are so inclined to show you, at the side of the shrine there is a walkway which also goes underground and again in that place, if you go deep enough, you’ll find a cavern-like place that is really cut off from the rest of the world. It’s dark. It was understood that Merkez Efendi spent a minimum of forty days in that cavern underground.
