Rumi founded no order. His son Sultan Walad organised his father's followers into one after his death, built the lodge around the tomb, and established the succession of masters that ran in the family for centuries. The green tiled cone over the grave is the emblem of Konya, and the complex became a place of visit rather than only of burial.
The Mevlevis developed the turning ceremony into a fixed liturgy with a sequence that has been kept for centuries: a eulogy of the Prophet, an improvisation on the reed flute recalling the opening of the Masnavi, a slow processional greeting three times around the floor, then four sections of turning separated by pauses. The dress carries the meaning openly, the tall felt hat read as a gravestone and the white skirt as a shroud, and the turner holds the right palm upward to receive and the left downward to pass on, so that nothing is kept. Training was long and domestic: a novice served in the lodge kitchen for a thousand and one days before being counted a member.
The Turkish Republic closed all dervish lodges and dissolved the orders by law in 1925, and the Konya lodge became a museum the following year. The ceremony was permitted again from the 1950s as a cultural performance, which is the legal basis on which it is still presented, and it was added to the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008. Every December the anniversary of Rumi's death fills the city, and the tension between a devotional practice and an authorised performance of one is visible to anybody who attends.