Rumi's death is still marked as an anniversary of celebration rather than mourning, since his followers hold that dying was, for him, a reunion rather than a loss.
From Khorasan to Konya
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in the region of Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, and his family fled westward ahead of advancing Mongol armies in the early thirteenth century, eventually settling in Konya. There he met the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz, a relationship widely credited with transforming Rumi from a conventional religious scholar into the poet whose verse, especially the Masnavi, became central to Persian mystical literature.
Shab-e Arus
Rumi died in Konya in 1273, and the anniversary of his death is marked by his followers as Shab-e Arus, the wedding night, understood as the night his soul was reunited with the divine rather than as an occasion for grief, a framing that shapes the tone of the annual commemorations held at his tomb to this day.
A tomb under a green dome
Rumi's mausoleum, topped by a distinctive tiled green dome, sits within a complex that also houses a museum of Mevlevi Sufi order artefacts, manuscripts and musical instruments, preserving the order's material culture even though the order itself was formally banned from operating as a religious institution in Turkey in 1925.