Understanding Hacı Bektaş Veli and His Legacy

He gave his name to one of the most distinctive of Sufi orders, the Bektashis. He was the most prominent figure around whom much of Alevi identity took shape, and he is still venerated by millions of devotees in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the diaspora. He was recognized as a veli, a saint, and has even been called Kutbu’l-Evliyâ, the Axis of the Saints. Among the many similar saintly figures who left their marks on this landscape and drew communities to form around their memories, Hacı Bektaş was positioned as standing above them all, and his impact proved the most far-reaching. But what do we really know about the life and character of this saint, and about the extent and evolution of his legacy? And more fundamentally, how do we know what we know?

Despite his cultural preeminence, Hacı Bektaş was not nearly as well documented as many figures who were active in the urban religious circles of his era, such as Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi. All evidence suggests that Hacı Bektaş was buried in a village near Kırşehir in Central Anatolia, which very early came to bear his name and is still a major pilgrimage site. While we don’t have conclusive dates for him, he was clearly active in the thirteenth century, and deceased certainly by the 1290s. This places Hacı Bektaş in a formative period in the religious and political history of Anatolia, or Rum as it was then known — a time of mass migrations from Central Asia, settlement among and interactions with diverse local peoples, and political upheavals such as the Mongol invasions and the Babai rebellion.

It was in this context that mystical religious cultures were evolving in rural Anatolia, in ways parallel to, yet distinct from, those in the cities like Konya. These were populations not entirely subject to the dominance of normative Sunni Islam — which was itself still taking shape — but who were cultivating their own particular orientations: the veneration of charismatic leaders and shrine visitation, a devotional affiliation to figures associated with the Ehl-i Beyt, and the performance of mystical poetry to music, accompanied by the ritual dancing of semah. These features, we might note, are often referred to as representing beliefs, but if we are to analyze them as observable cultural elements, we might instead think of them in terms of discourses and practices — that is, things people actually say and do, rather than what they adhere to internally.

While Hacı Bektaş also held importance for the Ottoman administration as patron saint of the Janissary corps, it was in communities outside those dominant circles that his influence was most deeply felt. What sustained his legacy for them was a saintly prominence built up through centuries of devotional work. It is to the narrative dimension of this work that we now turn.

Narrating Sainthood: The Vilâyetnâme

Most of what we imagine about the life of the saint comes to us through a hagiographical work known as the Vilâyetnâme of Hacı Bektaş. First written down probably in the fifteenth century, the work draws on oral tales to narrate his life from birth to death over roughly eighty episodes. Its very title — literally, the Book of Sainthood — expresses the work’s intent: to prove Hacı Bektaş’s greatness as a saint. With this in mind, we can bring an analytical eye to the work. We can consider the motivations that went into its composition and transmission, we can look for the ways it positions its characters, and we can ask how it reflects a worldview as it narrates its hero’s sainthood.

In the Vilayetname, Hacı Bektaş is said to have come from Khorasan, which for Anatolian Sufism is considered the sacred homeland. Seyyid descent from one of the Twelve Imams is, in this devotional world, a mark of distinction and a source of authority, so the work first traces, generation by generation, Hacı Bektaş’s descent from the seventh imam Musa-yı Kâzım, and thence through Hüseyn, Ali and Fatıma, ultimately to the Prophet. This is a sacred lineage, even if not a historically verifiable one. And a key section of the work narrates how Hacı Bektaş was sent by Ahmed Yesevi on a mission to Rum, and how he settled in a village there — and this mirrors the migration of peoples from Central Asia, who also settled in Central Anatolia.

Once he is settled, a lengthy series of episodes narrates Hacı Bektaş’s interactions with Türkmen villagers, local Christians, rival saints who challenge him, other great saints as his peers, and various political and religious power holders, whom he supports or forces to submit, according to whether they accept his authority or try to resist it. With all of these types, he must in some way demonstrate his saintly authority, and this he does by performing miraculous acts, or kerâmet. These miracles then serve as proof of his sainthood, or vilâyet.

It might be difficult for modern audiences to accept that saints could really transform into animals, or make rocks talk. But, if we read the miracle tales through analytical lenses, like the motivations of the narrator, or the reactions of the characters who witness them, then we find fascinating narrations of vilâyet. A case in point is the episode in which Hacı Bektaş subdues the Rum Erenleri, the rival Saints of Anatolia.

Hacı Bektaş Subdues the Rum Erenleri

As Hacı Bektaş approaches the land of Rum, he transforms into a dove as a sign of his peaceful purpose, but the saints already there become aware of his arrival and try to block him, fearing he will take away all their disciples. They send one of their own, who assumes the form of a falcon to attack the dove, but Hacı Bektaş turns back into a human and forces the rival to submit. The Rum Erenleri still resist, though, until Hacı Bektaş extinguishes their candles and makes their prayer rugs disappear — symbols of their authority, gone. When they finally come, in submission, to Hacı Bektaş’s presence, they find that their prayer rugs are there, arranged before him.

We notice that by the end of this story, the Rum Erenleri have maintained their own positions of authority, except that now, they’re subordinate to Hacı Bektaş.

Such miraculous acts are striking illustrations of the case the narrative makes for Hacı Bektaş’s preeminence as a saint. He performs his dominance within the story, and the very act of telling the story is itself a further performance of that dominance. In this way, the idea of Hacı Bektaş’s superior sainthood is transmitted and maintained over time. This transmission took material form as the full text of the Vilayetname was written out, by hand, over and over, perpetuating Hacı Bektaş’s life story in the imaginations of its audience. This was an enduring manuscript tradition, lasting from the fifteenth century well into the twentieth, and it was widespread — more than one hundred surviving copies have been identified, and there were likely countless more that have been lost to time. The Vilayetname and its manuscript tradition, along with other repeated acts of devotion, carried Hacı Bektaş’s sainthood into the modern period.

But what other forms did his legacy take?

Forming Communities: Bektashis, Alevis, and Alevi-Bektashis

The Vilayetname portrays diverse types of people drawn to Hacı Bektaş — there are dervishes who commit themselves to his path and to perpetuating his legacy institutionally, and there are villagers who recognize his sainthood and venerate him as unaffiliated devotees. These different modes of attachment — to the saint as master, and to the saint as object of devotion — would, over time, give rise to distinct traditions, each with its own structure, symbols, practice, and relationship to his legacy.

The most prominent bearer of Hacı Bektaş’s name is the Bektashi Order, which emerged from the world of wandering dervishes and developed into a fully institutionalized Sufi order — or tarîkat — based in tekkes — dervish cloisters or lodges. It came to be marked by a distinctive hierarchy, costume, and ritual practice, with membership conferred through a complex initiation rite. Tekkes or dergâhs were led by figures called baba — which is why this tradition is often referred to as Babagân. The Bektashi order spread throughout the Ottoman world, though the political upheavals of the modern period left concentrations in certain parts of the Balkans, particularly in Albania. In Turkey, though its tekkes have been officially closed since the suppression of the Sufi orders in 1925, this Bektashi tradition does continue.

A distinct tradition going by the name Bektashi centers on the Çelebi lineage, whose authority derives not from acquired spiritual rank but from claimed blood descent from Hacı Bektaş himself. That authority has not gone uncontested — disputes over custodianship of the saint’s shrine have been a recurring feature of its history. The lineage’s influence expanded particularly in the nineteenth century, and today the Çelebis exercise authority over a wide network of followers in Anatolia, whose ritual practice bears close resemblance to that of the Alevis.

The communities known historically as Kızılbaş, and today most commonly as Alevi, represent the broadest and most decentralized of the traditions linked to Hacı Bektaş. Traditionally rooted in village and family life rather than the tekke and the dervish path, Alevi communities are organized around independent ocaks — hereditary lines of religious authority. While individual ocaks derive their descent from different founding saints, Hacı Bektaş is widely recognized across these communities as the preeminent saint of the broader sacred geography — even without a direct institutional affiliation.

Despite their structural differences, these traditions are today often grouped together under the umbrella term Alevi-Bektashi — a reflection of the gravitational pull that Hacı Bektaş continues to exert. We see this clearly in the way Alevi communities themselves have reached for his name as a marker of identity: some associations bear his name outright, while many more incorporate it in the form Alevi-Bektashi. And, it is overwhelmingly Alevis who make up the thousands of pilgrims who visit his tomb in Hacıbektaş each year — a living practice of devotion to his presence. Hacı Bektaş continues to draw communities to him, and to serve as the emblem of their identities.

Variations on a Saint

With this level of cultural relevance and prominence, and given the scrutiny of an empire increasingly defined by normative Sunni Islam, the questions of who Hacı Bektaş was and how he behaved religiously would inevitably carry significant implications for the communities invested in his legacy. At the heart of the matter is the question of his praxis: did he conform to the şerîat, the normative requirements of Islamic practice? A debate over this issue began not long after his death, and has continued to flare up ever since. We should note that it is today usually framed in terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but since the issue is almost always one of practice rather than belief or doctrine, we might instead use the more precise terms orthopraxy and heteropraxy — and these we should understand not as fixed categories of religious practice, but as modes of discourse, describing the ways that şerîat-minded commentators have talked about and evaluated the conduct of Hacı Bektaş and his followers.

The earliest source to address the question is not a work about Hacı Bektaş at all, but a fourteenth-century hagiography of Mevlana Rumi, which does include two episodes with Hacı Bektaş as a character, and in both tales he is portrayed as a rival saint who did not conform to the şerîat and did not perform namaz. Of course, in this hagiography’s world, not conforming to the şerîat is considered reprehensible, so this characterization may tell us as much about its author’s own interest in discrediting a competitor to Rumi as about Hacı Bektaş himself. By the sixteenth century, Ottoman scholars — aware of the saint’s importance for the crucial Janissary corps — had shifted this picture, insisting that Hacı Bektaş was himself a paragon of Islamic virtue — though his followers, the Bektashis, had lapsed into unacceptable behavior. This pattern of the pious saint and the reprobate disciples recurs over the centuries, and the pattern itself is revealing: commentators’ characterizations of Hacı Bektaş are consistently shaped by their positioning in relation to the communities that act in his name.

The saintly prominence that kept this question alive for centuries took on new dimensions in the modern period, as the ideologies of nationalism and secularism generated new modes of claiming Hacı Bektaş and new stakes for doing so. When the conditions in which he is remembered change, the values his rememberers project onto him also change. So, in the Republican period, Hacı Bektaş was increasingly claimed as a symbol of a modernizing, secularizing Turkish nation — recast as a proto-enlightenment thinker, a tolerant humanist, a champion of universal human values, though decidedly of Turkish ethnicity. Many modern Alevis, though certainly not all, have in turn allowed elements of this new secular-national image to merge with their own inherited understandings of Hacı Bektaş, because it offers a dignified public expression of an identity that has generally found greater acceptance under the secular Republic than under the preceding Ottoman order. This illustrates once again how changing social circumstances reshape the saint through those who remember him.

This new framing is perhaps most vividly embodied in an image displayed in many Alevi homes and on banners flying at festivals: a triad of Hacı Bektaş, Axis of the Anatolian Saints; Ali, from whom Alevis draw their sacred genealogy, and take their very name; and Atatürk, who established the modern Republic where their value found a place. The convergence of these saintly symbols of Alevi self-understanding in a single image neatly illustrates how communities project their deepest concerns onto the figures they venerate.

In Retrospect, the Saint

The approach we’ve taken in this talk — tracing the life, the narratives, the communities, and the contestations surrounding Hacı Bektaş — is an act of retrospection. Critical historical thinking is always situated in time, always looking back from a particular vantage point, and always shaped by the questions its moment makes pressing. And the actors we have encountered here were doing the same: reading the past through the lens of their own concerns, and seeing there a saintly figure who reflected those concerns back at them. What we can add, with the benefit of the longer view, is that this retrospective shaping is not necessarily a distortion to be corrected, but is rather an intrinsic feature of how sainthood operates, and of how communities sustain themselves through devotion to their saints. Hacı Bektaş struck a chord with people of a particular religious sensibility, and through centuries of devotional and narrative work carried forward by successive generations of devotees, his position as the Axis of Saints has been maintained. His legacy remains, ultimately, a tradition in the making, shaped anew by each generation of communities who find in him a reflection of how they understand themselves. And, in retrospect, our understanding of Hacı Bektaş and his legacy is itself a product of this process — drawn from the same narratives, devotional practices, and communal perspectives, but viewed through a lens that zooms in to examine how each works, and then zooms out to take them all in. And that is how a fuller, more multifaceted Hacı Bektaş emerges — not as he was, but as he has been made.