Meeting with Hızır, from Past to Present Alevism

Imagine driving at night along an empty mountain road winding through valleys. On one side, a river flows quietly; on the other, steep cliffs rise abruptly to massive heights. Aside from a few mountain goats and a wild boar, you haven’t encountered another soul in a long time. Unexpectedly, your headlights reveal an old, bearded man, dressed in shabby clothes, walking alone on the roadside. You pull over and ask if he is alright, where he is headed, and whether he needs any help. You even offer him a ride to the next town, which he declines. You then offer him 50 liras, apologizing for the modest sum, before saying: “Pray for me”. He replies, quietly: “In fact, I am already praying.” You start the engine and drive on. A few meters down the road, a thought suddenly crosses your mind: What if it was Hızır? You turn to look back, but it is too late. The old man has vanished. 

This story, inspired from a lived encounter with Hızır, is one of the many that can be heard among present Alevi communities. This narrative is set in Anatolia, near Bingöl, on the road leading to Varto. Compared to other similar stories, it ends well: the driver manages to drive away, left to reflect on the unsettling encounter he just experienced. Others were not so fortunate. Once, I was told about a minibus driver who suffered a terrible accident on the edge of the Munzur valley, in Dersim, after refusing to help an old man by the roadside, because he was too dirty and would stain the seats. Someone else told me about an entire family that was killed in a car accident after ignoring the warnings of an old man walking along the road. These stories were shared with me by the daughters, sons, nephews, and nieces, as they were passed down to them within their families. They recounted how their relatives had been tested by Hızır, and how, having failed to act morally, they were severely punished.

As an anthropologist, I have spent several years gathering narratives of encounters with Hızır for my PhD thesis, studying how these experiences change from “traditional”, rural, to contemporary, urban and diasporic, Alevi contexts. To do so, I had to draw on a variety of different sources. First, I did several months of fieldwork in urban and rural Alevi settings, primarily in Istanbul and in the region of Dersim, as well as among the French diasporas. Second, I used the archives and publications of folklorists, local historians, past and current researchers documenting the many aspects of the Alevi life. As a researcher, my aim was to take these supernatural encounters seriously, to try to understand the lived experience of such meetings, the way they are told, how they affect people and their surroundings, and to situate them within the broader social and political contexts shaping these communities. As we will see in this short introductory course, Hızır is a central and meaningful figure in Alevism. may be understood as a powerful spiritual symbol, an ethical and moral guidance, and as a deeply counterintuitive figure with whom the possibility of an encounter has long been nurtured within Alevi communities.

Most scholars agree that the Turkish name Hızır and its Kurdish equivalent Xizir originate from the Arabic al-Khidr, literally meaning “the Verdant One.”

According to written sources, the first figure known to have encountered Khidr is the Prophet Moses, Musa. In the Qur’an, in the surah of the Cave (verses 60–82), Musa is sent by God to a place called “the confluence of the seas” to meet one of His “servants” endowed with “grace” and “knowledge emanating from Him.” This mysterious figure, who bears no name in the Qur’anic narrative, was later identified – in post-Qur’anic literature – as al-Khidr, “the Verdant One,” “the Green One.” According the ninth-century Arab historian al-Ṭabarī, he was given this name “because one day he sat on a stone, and when he rose, it turned green beneath him and, by God’s command, grass grew upon it.” In the Qur’an, Musa asks this unnamed figure to take him on a journey and share his knowledge. Khidr agrees on a single condition: that Musa ask no questions. Along the way, he commits three violent and seemingly senseless acts: he scuttles a boat, kills a child, and helps wicked villagers rebuild a wall – each time provoking Musa’s outrage. Khidr then brings their journey to an end, reveals the hidden meaning behind each act, and disappears.

The German historian Patrick Franke has shown that the encounter with Khidr is a historically distinctive feature of the Sufi experience in Islam, and subsequently of the Alevi traditions that developed from it. The Qur’anic narrative served as a parable of the relationship between the spiritual master – known in Alevism as dede, pîr, or mürşit – and the disciple, talip. It was later mobilized to draw a distinction between ordinary knowledge, understood as adherence to the outward rules of the Law (zahir), and higher, esoteric, mystical knowledge (batin). In some Islamic traditions also known to many Alevi dede, Khidr comes to serve as the tutor of prophets: many hold that not only Musa, but all the prophets were among his disciples. Some of the great masters of Sufism, such as Ibn al-ʿArabī, are said to have met Khidr and thereby been initiated into the secret teachings of God. Following this Sufi legacy, Khidr is a recurrent figure in Alevi religious sources, both oral and written. Across this complex and plural corpus, Hızır appears variously as a companion to holy figures, as a model of sanctity, and as a vehicle for the transmission of the miraculous powers (keramet) attributed to religious authorities. Whether named or not, the hagiographies of many saints recount a meeting with an old, bearded man who guides them and thereby confirms their spiritual standing.

Also known as “Uncle White,” Xalo Sîpe, or the “white-bearded,” aksakallı, Hızır is said to visit the homes of Alevi families during the harsh winter month that bears his name. Following the three-day fast, and prior to the dede‘s visit for the yearly cem, some families used to prepare for his arrival by placing a candle in a plate filled with grounded wheat. His passage is believed to be confirmed by the imprint of a horse’s hoof left in the wheat, a sign that brings great blessing upon the entire household. This practice is shared with Ezidi and Armenian communities. In this regard, an encounter with Hızır was at once an exceptional event, marking the outstanding spiritual status of certain religious figures, and an ordinary one, potentially accessible to anyone.

Hızır, the immortal saint venerated across Alevi and broader Islamic traditions in Turkey, is the master of the moral trial. He is unpredictable by principle: as people say, her kılıkte gelir –  “he comes in all forms.” In practice, however, his apparitions follow recognizable patterns. He tends to appear in liminal spaces: on the threshold of a door or along a roadside, both of which function as transitional zones between inside and outside, between the visible and invisible worlds. His preferred disguises are those of the most vulnerable: a tired old man, a wounded beggar, reminiscent of the dervish character. He may appear in waking life or in dreams, on mountain roads, at highland summer pastures, or even, in more recent accounts, at the door of an urban apartment. The encounter is mostly sudden, brief, and unannounced. Nothing confirms it at the time; only the strange disappearance of the visitor instils the retrospective doubt that transforms an ordinary moment into a sacred ordeal, of which one must face the consequences. 

The trial itself is structured around a paradox: Hızır, one the most powerful being in the Alevi cosmology presents himself as the weakest. He asks for loqme, bread, money, a glass of water, a night’s shelter. The person being tested momentarily holds the upper hand. They can give or refuse, welcome or turn away, speak kindly or dismissively. Should they pass, offering charity generously and without hesitation, Hızır bestows bereket, the Islamic concept of divine abundance, rewarding and blessing the household’s food supplies, livestock, or children. Failure, however, brings a punishment, a curse in the form of a catastrophe: a road accident, the sudden death of a child, the drying up of resources. The punishment is often collective, falling on the household rather than the individual alone, for in many accounts Hızır kills children, or even drowns entire villages that failed to show hospitality. An additional constraint weighs on those rewarded: they must keep the encounter secret, or else the bereket will vanish. 

Underlying this dramatic scenario is a moral taxonomy that pervades many aspects of the Alevi worldview: the distinction between the oppressor (zalim) and the oppressed (mazlum). Drawn from the Islamic vocabulary and deeply embedded in contemporary Alevi political consciousness, these categories structure the meaning of Hızır’s trial. By taking the form of an utterly defenceless being, Hızır temporarily inverts the cosmic hierarchy to reveal where each person truly stands. Even someone who is structurally oppressed, as Alevis often collectively understand themselves to be, can, in a single gesture of refusal, become an oppressor. Hızır’s trial thus performs a crucial moral function within a community defined by its experience of persecution: it prevents collective victimhood from becoming a blanket moral absolution, reminding each individual that power is always relational, and that the moment of encounter with the weakest is also the moment of ethical reckoning.

The Alevi homelands of Anatolia, and especially the heartland of Dersim, comprise hundred, if not thousands, sacred sites of visitation – known as ziyaret, or jiare – of which many are dedicated to Hızır. These places often mark the trace of a past apparition, most characteristically a hoofprint deeply impressed in rock. Also known as Boz Atlı Hızır – “Hızır on the Grey Horse” – he is said to come to the aid of desperate people who call upon him in their most dire moments. His apparitions take the form of a majestic horseman, roaming the landscape to rescue the innocent and the oppressed. The Alevi homeland is thus traversed by a dense network of such sacred spaces – trees, rocks, waterfalls – to which people come to visit, rest, pray, sacrifice animals, and share loqme.

One interesting, and perhaps distinctive, feature of Hızır in comparison with the many other holy entities that populate the ziyaret/jiara system of Alevi cosmology is that Hızır travels. Riding his horse or moving between the visible and invisible worlds, he is known to be in motion and is therefore less bound to a single fixed place as other ziyaret usually are. This peculiar quality makes him especially relevant for Alevi communities that became a diaspora over the course of the twentieth century. As Alevis developed into a multilingual, transnational, and circulating community – moving and settling into new contexts – my research found that some of them brought their holy protector with them. Or more precisely: Hızır followed some of the Alevis to the great metropoles of Turkey and Western Europe, offering assistance and relief in the face of exile, migration, violence, and discrimination.

In the course of my research, I encountered several narratives circulating within families in which Hızır had intervened along the path of exile, lending an invisible hand at critical moments. One such story concerns a man from an ocak family who arrived illegally in Italy and narrowly avoided a police check at the airport, escaping what might have meant arrest and imprisonment. Others recounted how their mother or grandmother had one day found, in their apartment in Istanbul, Ankara, Berlin, or Frankfurt, that an elderly bearded man had entered to deliver a message. Some encounters are more sudden: a ghostly white presence appearing during a car accident to avert death – one such account I heard concerns a road between France and Germany. Finally, there is the realm of dreams, long understood as a privileged opening onto the occult, hidden dimension of the batin. Hızır can be encountered in dreams even in Europe: he may choose to appear, delivering messages, warnings, or prophecies that profoundly shape the lives of those who receive them. A dream is never merely an intimate, individual occurrence – it is also social, insofar as it generates discussion, interpretation, and action, and carries consequences that ripple outward into the collective. Many parents also invoke Hızır on behalf of their children before school exams, wishing that he might come to their aid. These examples are representative of a broader pattern: that of migrants carrying their gods, spirits, and supernatural protectors into the new lands they come to inhabit, thereby weaving a thread of continuity with the homelands they have left behind.

In contemporary Alevism, that is in urban and diasporic contexts, meetings with Hızır may circulate as narratives of a past, lost world, known to elderly generations, raising questions for the young generations. In the secularized and politicized context of current Alevism, the figure of Hızır has also been called to new purposes, acting as a symbol for ethical behaviour and solidarity in dire times. Under the motto, “Let’s be Hızır to one another”, Alevi associations are readapting the old teachings to the social and humanitarian crises of the present. The catastrophic earthquakes of February 2023 in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria offered a striking illustration of this dynamic. As state emergency services failed to respond and tens of thousands remained trapped under rubble, Alevi federations across France, Germany, and Turkey mobilized rapidly, calling on their members to donate. The European Alevi federation framed its fundraising appeal with the explicit injunction: “Act like Hızır!” – a formulation that condensed centuries of devotional tradition into an urgent call for collective action. This redeployment of Hızır reflects a broader effort to translate the spiritual doctrine of a divine presence dwelling within the human being into an institutionalized ethics of care. Hızır is explicitly redefined: no longer the white-bearded old man arriving on a white horse, he becomes instead the moral imperative to aid the fellow soul, feed the hungry, and stand beside the persecuted. Cemevi are called upon to become, in short, institutional incarnations of Hızır. 

The case of Hızır thus offers an example of how beliefs rooted in the social and cosmological relationships of a bygone world are being reappropriated and reconfigured within the contemporary moment. Although the Alevi way of life has undergone considerable transformation over recent decades, the figure of Hızır has been invested with new forms of relevance, continuing to shape the spiritual and ethical life of these communities.