Essential Turkish phrases

'Meat bread' — a paper-thin flatbread up to a metre long, topped with minced lamb and baked in a wood oven. Konya's dish. It is ordered by length, shared, and eaten with the hands after being cut across.

Lamb roasted for hours in a stone oven until it falls apart, sold by weight with bread and nothing else. The city's other great dish, and lunch rather than dinner — the good places sell out by two.

The greeting and its reply. Worth knowing that in Konya this is the everyday default in a way it is not in İzmir or Antalya, where 'merhaba' does the same job. Using it correctly is read as respect rather than as performance.

'Our master' — how the thirteenth-century poet Rumi is referred to here, essentially never by the name the rest of the world uses. 'Mevlâna'ya gidiyorum' means going to his tomb, which is the centre of the city in every sense.

'The wedding night' — 17 December, the anniversary of Rumi's death, understood as his union with God rather than as a death. The city fills, hotels sell out months ahead, and the sema ceremonies run for a week.

The whirling ceremony. It is a religious ritual, not a dance and not a show — applause during one is a misstep. Learning that distinction before your first is the single easiest way to avoid embarrassing yourself here.

A sinkhole. The Konya plain has hundreds, opening where groundwater has been drawn down for irrigation, and new ones make the local news regularly. It is an ordinary word here and a genuine feature of the landscape.

The Konya plain — a vast flat basin of wheat, barley and sugar beet that is a large part of the country's grain supply. The horizon is genuinely uninterrupted, which people from hilly countries find unsettling for about a month.

The dry, still, biting frost of a clear plateau night. Not the same word as 'soğuk' (cold) — ayaz is specifically the windless, cloudless cold that follows a bright winter day, and January here averages a −4.1°C low.

The old stone village on the city's north-western edge, Greek-speaking until 1924, with a Byzantine church still standing in it. 'Sille'ye çıkalım' is the standard suggestion for a Sunday.

Yüksek Hızlı Tren — the high-speed train. Konya was on Türkiye's second high-speed line and it reshaped the city: Ankara in well under two hours, Istanbul in an afternoon. 'YHT'yle giderim' is a normal answer to how you'll get anywhere.

Help! — for emergencies. Dial 112 for police, fire and ambulance alike; in this enormous, largely rural province it is the jandarma on 156 who cover most of the ground outside the city.