From Brazil To Mongolia, Sun Dances With Moon

By Joanne Omang - Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006

KONYA, Turkey, March 29-- As the sun went dark here Wednesday, a dervish mystic whirled in a garden, one hand pointing to the earth, the other to the sky. "The solar system turns like the dervish, a cosmic dance," said Bekir Sahin, director of rare books and manuscripts in this provincial center of Islamic study. "Konya today is the center of the universe."

A total eclipse of the sun drew thousands of astronomers, eclipse groupies and tourists to this town for a glimpse of the cosmic dance that began at sunrise in Brazil and ended at sunset in northern Mongolia.
For many people, the journey here was spiritual. This ancient center of scholarship and the Sufi branch of Islam welcomed more than 3,000 foreign visitors to a day of contemplation mixed with science and a picnic holiday.
"We have busloads of people from Egypt, from Germany, from Japan," said Mevlut Bektas, director of tourism and culture. Every hotel room in the city was taken, he said. The Turkish government was expecting more than the 3.5 million visitors who came to the country for another total eclipse in 1999, and special festivals and tours were set up nationwide.

At the tomb of the 13th-century philosopher and mystic Celaleddin Rumi, who is known as Mevlana, villagers peered at the vanishing sun through special glasses distributed free by the local government. A chattering crowd in the garden outside the tomb fell quiet as the warm, clear day slowly turned wintry in thinning sunlight. They gasped as one at the moment of totality: Twilight surged around the horizon, Venus appeared in a midnight sky, and a ring of fire circled the black hole where the sun had been.

Sahin, the manuscript scholar, directed visitors to the nearby museum's display of astronomical equipment and documents dating from the Seljuk empire of the 11th to 13th centuries. "We believe the eclipse has an effect on the human heart, whether we feel it or not," he said.

From Turkey, the total eclipse moved across the Black Sea, then Georgia and southern Russia. In Baghdad, outside the path of totality, residents were briefly diverted from the continuing trauma of war as they looked aloft to see a partial obscuring of the sun, a crescent. In Bangladesh, the moon took a mere bite off the edge of the solar disk. Finally, at dusk over Asia, the sun and the moon parted ways.