The Mevlevi Order—founded in thirteenth-century Konya by the followers of the poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi—established its Istanbul presence gradually. The Galata Mevlevihanesi came first, then the lodge at Yenikapı. The Beşiktaş lodge, established in 1613, was the third. Its founder was Ohrili Hüseyin Pasha, an Ottoman Grand Vizier whose career exemplified the empire's habit of drawing talent from the Balkans: Ohrili—meaning 'from Ohrid'—referred to the North Macedonian city that had produced him. That a Grand Vizier chose to endow a Mevlevi lodge in Beşiktaş speaks to how thoroughly Sufi orders were woven into Ottoman elite culture. The whirling dervishes were not marginal; they operated in the heart of the imperial city, patronized by its most powerful figures, and their music and practice shaped Istanbul's spiritual and aesthetic life for centuries.

The lodge's history is a story of persistence against the ambitions of city-builders. The first demolition came when the expanding footprint of Çırağan Palace—one of the great Ottoman palaces on the Bosphorus—consumed the original site. The lodge was rebuilt near a graveyard in Maçka, somewhat inland from the water. The second demolition followed when Sultan Abdülaziz ordered new barracks constructed and the lodge again stood in the way. It was rebuilt a third time, this time at a site beside the Golden Horn in the Bahariye neighbourhood—the district that eventually gave the lodge the name by which it is most often remembered. The new location, on the road between Eyüp and Alibeyköy, was further from the Bosphorus but no less active. In its final Bahariye incarnation, the lodge comprised a group of timber buildings resembling waterfront mansions, a complex that added what contemporary accounts describe as beauty to that stretch of the Golden Horn.

A Mevlevi lodge was a school as much as a place of worship. Dervishes entered as students, sometimes as children, and spent years learning the music, the poetry, and the physical discipline of the sema. The Beşiktaş lodge brought up musicians and religious scholars of note across its three centuries of operation. Among those associated with it were Zekâizâde Ahmed Nureddin, Râşid Efendi, the physician Doktor Subhî Bey, Arif Bey, Münir Kökden, Sabri Efendi, Nurullah Kılıç, and Cemal Dede—figures who moved through Istanbul's musical and religious worlds and whose names survived in the records that the lodge itself did not. The lodge's particular distinction, according to one account, was that it was the last Mevlevi house to be allocated and sponsored by government officials—a mark of how close the connection between the Ottoman state and the Sufi orders remained until the very end.

The Turkish Republic's Law No. 677 of 1925 banned all Sufi orders and closed their lodges. Atatürk's reforms aimed to separate public life from religious practice, and the tekkes and dervish houses—regarded as centres of pre-republican religious authority—were shuttered, their buildings repurposed or left to deteriorate. The Beşiktaş lodge, having already moved three times to survive palace construction and military barracks, could not survive this. Deprived of its community and its function, the timber buildings began to decay. The process was completed in 1986 during the Golden Horn rehabilitation project, when whatever physical remnants remained were removed. The site is gone. There is no monument, no marker, no interpretive sign. The lodge exists now only in the records: administrative documents from the Ottoman period, the names of the scholars and musicians it trained, and the occasional reference in histories of Istanbul's vanished Sufi landscape.

The Mevlevi practice did not disappear with its lodges. Sema ceremonies are performed today at the surviving Galata Mevlevihanesi—now a museum as well as a ceremonial space—and at venues across Istanbul and Turkey. The whirling meditation that Rumi's followers developed in the thirteenth century has been recognized by UNESCO as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Visitors to Istanbul who attend a sema are seeing a practice that was also performed, for three hundred years, in the Bahariye neighbourhood beside the Golden Horn—in a timber lodge that was torn down so many times it eventually ran out of places to be rebuilt.