The Hich Hotel Konya is a 4-star hotel in a 19th-century building. It's located next to the Mevlâna Museum, the mausoleum of Sufi poet Rumi, and a 4-minute walk from the Selimiye Mosque. The hotel has a garden, terrace, and cozy cafe that serves free breakfast (not buffet, but a large varied tray with too much food to comfortably finish). The rooms are traditionally decorated with handmade rugs, original artwork, and desks (their description) – actually the furniture looked like random pieces of 1960’s designs picked up at thrift shops, but functional, all the same. Some rooms have museum views. The hotel is not wheelchair accessible and the rooms and reception lobby are upstairs (and there is no elevator). I really wanted to love this hotel, but our room was spartan with old furniture, the shower was not all that well cleaned, the air conditioner didn’t work properly, the bed was not uncomfortable, but pretty hard and the TV had only one station in English which had 24-hour evangelist preachers. To the hotel ‘s credit, the staff was always polite (just occasionally missing), our room seemed freshly painted, the woodwork newly varnished and the TV (pragmatically useless as it was to us) was a modern flat-screen unit. The white-painted iron bed frame looks brand-new. Like the rest of the hotel and restaurant, there are copious libraries of current and classic books – but all are in Turkish. The 6AM morning call to prayer from the nearby mosque seemed to be a duet lamentation with one singer’s amplifier on extreme reverb. Maybe its just a style, maybe it’s a Suffi thing – when I asked, I was told that it’s not unusual and sometimes there are three voices. The front desk of the hotel was frequently vacant and requests for service went sometimes unheeded until asked a second time. The food, both breakfast and dinner, in the restaurant was excellent and reasonably priced but, again, the service was nearly non-existent.
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