The Mevlevis are also known as the "whirling dervishes" due to their famous practice of whirling as a form of dhikr (remembrance of God). Dervish is a common term for an initiate of the Sufi path; whirling is part of the formal sema ceremony and the participants are properly known as semazens.

The Galata tekke has a long and revered history, having been founded in 1491 by a Ottoman grandee from the palace of Sultan Beyazit II. The tekke’s first şeyh(sheikh, leader) was Muhammed Semaî Sultan Divanî, a descendant of Mevlâna Jelaleddin Rumî himself.

The building you see is not the original, which burned in 1765, but its replacement, which dates from 1796 and was extensively restored during the 19th century, also between 1967 and 1972, and again in 2008.

The Galata Mevlevihanesi Müzesi is open daily except Monday from 09:00am to 16:30 (4:30pm), with last entry at 16:00 (4pm). There is a small admission fee.

Galip Dede, a renowned 17th-century sheikh of this tekke, is buried in an ornate tomb to the left as you enter from the street.

Kumbaracıbaşı Ahmet Paşa, better known in the west as Claude Alexandre, Comte de Bonneval (1675-1747), a French nobleman who converted to Islam and entered the sultan’s service as a bombardier general, is also buried on the tekke’s grounds.

Nearby is the tomb of İbrahim Müteferrika (1674-1745), an ethnic Hungarian Unitarian from Transylvania who converted to Islam and established the first Arabic/Ottoman moveable-type printing press in the Ottoman Empire in the 1720s.