Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207, probably in the region of Balkh, and migrated west with his family amid political instability and Mongol expansion. They eventually settled in Konya, capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. Rumi succeeded his father as a religious teacher and transformed through encounters with the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz. His Persian poetry, especially the Masnavi and lyric collection associated with Shams, explored longing, ethical discipline, divine love, and spiritual union while emerging from a specific Islamic scholarly and Sufi world.

Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. His followers understood death as reunion with the beloved and called the anniversary Şeb-i Arus, the Wedding Night. A mausoleum rose over his grave in 1274 under Seljuk patronage, reportedly designed by Badr al-Din Tabrizi. The tall fluted and turquoise-tiled dome became the complex's defining form. Rumi's father, family members, disciples, and later Mevlevi figures were buried nearby, turning the garden associated with the Seljuk palace into a dynastic spiritual cemetery and pilgrimage place.

Rumi's son Sultan Walad helped organize the Mevlevi order around his father's teaching and memory. Over centuries Ottoman patrons enlarged the Konya lodge with a semahane for the whirling ceremony, mosque, kitchens, dervish cells, courtyards, fountains, and service rooms. Training combined music, poetry, prayer, etiquette, work, and disciplined turning rather than public performance alone. Manuscripts, instruments, textiles, Qurans, and relics accumulated. The surviving ensemble is consequently layered Seljuk and Ottoman construction, not one wholly thirteenth-century building created at the moment of Rumi's burial.

The Turkish Republic closed Sufi lodges in 1925 as part of secularizing reforms. The Konya complex reopened in 1927 as a museum, initially presenting antiquities as well as the mausoleum, and later became the Mevlana Museum. Museum use preserved buildings and collections but changed an active lodge into a state-curated heritage site. Conservation has repaired tiles, masonry, timber, decorative paint, manuscripts, textiles, and tomb coverings. Display arrangements and some furnishings reconstruct aspects of Mevlevi life; the tombs and major architectural spaces remain historic fabric, not newly fabricated devotional scenery.

Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism administers the museum, which also remains a powerful place of reverence for Muslim visitors and admirers of Rumi worldwide. Entry policies and crowd controls are set by the ministry, while commemorations extend to other venues in Konya. Visitors should distinguish the museum complex from staged sema performances and from the romantic idea that Rumi taught a generic spirituality detached from Islam. Its importance joins a genuine burial place, centuries of Mevlevi institutional life, Ottoman architectural patronage, republican transformation, preserved collections, and continuing pilgrimage within a public museum.