In Cappadocia, the practice blossomed for the next seven centuries, until it was banned under Ataturk in 1925. But because Turkey has become a paradoxically permissive state – and more importantly because the dervishes aren’t bad for tourism – Sufi mysticism is suddenly thriving again, unofficially on the second and last Sunday of each month. The sema is now one of Istanbul’s hottest tickets at $13 CDN apiece.

It begins, moving counterclockwise around an octagonal ring, with all the fanfare of a second hand hitting 12 on an old man’s pocket watch. It proceeds with the same inevitability after that. The pacing is measured. Without commotion, one semazen after the other ticks to six in the wooden circle, then inwards to the ringleader (sheikh), who systematically launches each into a distorted twirl, right hand turned upward ahead of the gaze to the gigantic chandelier overhead, the orchestra suddenly on top of them; reed flutes and lutes tempering the menace of kettle drums and cymbals with a Camelot court gentleness.

They are whirling now. The first thing that strikes me is how earnest and austere they whirl. It is so precise, so precious, so intimate that watching feels voyeuristic, and it’s only once the audience becomes comfortable with this intimacy that a tranquility takes over. By the time all 15 semazens are in simultaneous whir, I am struck by a sense that we are whirling away from, as much as toward, something particular. As the cycle ends and begins again, four times in total, the whirling seems not to be powered by anything tangible – like a record whose player has been unplugged, yet still somehow spins. One foot is firmly on an axis, the other crosses over and over with the drumming, which has now gone inside the whirler like a mantra. Except for the sweat dribbling down each semazen’s brow, the action is so perfect and effortless that you forget you’re watching human beings.

There is a spectrum of 15 different facial expressions, each frozen like you imagine the figures would be in the Cappadocian section of It’s A Small World. Their waxy expressions depict – unintentionally, I think – the different ways that humans approach exaltation. There is basic joy and basic fear, wonderment, contentment and confusion. From my vantage point, however, I do not see an expression that could be called “absolute bliss.”

These faces melt into relief as the final cycle ceases, and the semazen hug themselves as if for dear life. Some quiet moments pass, and they pace away, leaving us with a sense of having seen an hourglass expire rather than the pocket watch we first conceived, the one we imagine ticks through all of Istanbul. There is divinity, not necessarily in dizziness, but maybe just in looking up and rotating faster than the earth, and reaffirming that no matter how hard we try, we cannot will the sky to cave in. 

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