KONYA, Turkey — “Come,” Mawlana Jalal-ud-din Rumi says in his famous verse. “Come, even if you broke your penitence a hundred times/ Ours is the portal of hope/ Come as you are.” This invitation from the 13th century continues to lure millions of Turks and foreigners to Rumi’s shrine in Konya, a city in central Anatolia.

The mausoleum with its famous Green Dome covering the Sufi philosopher’s sarcophagus remains one of Turkey’s most-visited museums, with Chinese and Taiwanese visitors leading the list. In 2018, the number of visitors to the shrine jumped 13.5% from the year before, breaking its record by welcoming more than 2.8 million visitors, according to the Anatolia News Agency.

“Of the entire global population, without making a distinction by religion and race, those who have reached [Rumi’s] level of consciousness in the end come to Konya and Mawlana,” Uzeyir Ozyurt, a dervish of the Mevlevi Order, told Al-Monitor. “When they come to Konya and see the shared faith, they find that the life they have longed for and sought is this."

Ozyurt said that visitors, including CEOs and renowned healers from China, Iran, Taiwan, the United States, South Korea and other parts of the world as well as from all over Turkey, merely adhere to Rumi’s call to love. Some visit the city of the whirling dervishes after hearing the poet’s whispers in their dreams or after reading his monumental literary heritage, “Masnavi Ma’navi” ("The Spiritual Couplets").