Launched in April 2024 under the leadership of Rıza Şehri Academy, the Alevi Encyclopedia is a multilingual digital knowledge platform. It aims to compile Alevi knowledge on the basis of its own sources; to systematically classify written, oral, visual and digital materials; and to present this body of knowledge to readers in an accessible and comprehensible form, in accordance with academic standards.

The Alevi Encyclopedia is a collective knowledge production initiative that addresses the historical, religious, cultural, ritual, social and diasporic dimensions of Alevism together. It seeks to make Alevism visible through its own concepts, its own voice, its own memory and its own knowledge holders. The project was developed to preserve Alevi cultural heritage without distortion or destruction, to transmit it to new generations, and to make it available as a reliable reference source for researchers and the wider public.

In a short period of time, the Alevi Encyclopedia has moved beyond being merely a website and has become an important institutional infrastructure for the academic, social and digital circulation of Alevi knowledge. Publishing in Turkish, English and German, the platform reached more than 700,000 unique visitors, over 2.5 million visits and more than 3.3 million page views in its first year of publication. This level of public interest demonstrates the strong need for reliable, referenced, open-access and multilingual knowledge about Alevism.

In 2026, the Alevi Encyclopedia was registered within international library and archive infrastructures under the code DE-4607. This code belongs to the ISIL system — International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organisations. This registration shows that the Alevi Encyclopedia has become a digital knowledge resource that can be identified, catalogued and institutionally traced within international information, library and archive systems.

WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA?

Encyclopedias differ from dictionaries, edited volumes and individual academic publications in terms of their scope, form of writing and function. Since their emergence in the modern period, encyclopedias have served as key instruments for systematically organising historical and contemporary knowledge, filtering it through scholarly methods and making it accessible to the public. They have also played an important role in processes of social enlightenment.

For a field of belief and culture such as Alevism, which has historically faced oppression, exclusion, assimilation, massacres, denial and the destruction of cultural heritage, encyclopedic knowledge production carries particular importance. The Alevi Encyclopedia aims to create a knowledge platform through which Alevi communities can express their own histories, concepts, rituals, worlds of belief, memories and cultural heritage in a plural form. In doing so, it responds to approaches that define Alevism from the outside, reduce it to a single form, represent it inadequately or explain it only through the concepts of dominant knowledge regimes.

In this respect, the Alevi Encyclopedia is not merely a platform that transmits knowledge. It is also a decolonial initiative that seeks to strengthen the epistemic autonomy of Alevi knowledge. Epistemic autonomy means that Alevi communities have the right to speak about, interpret, represent and transmit their own knowledge worlds. Alevi knowledge is not only an object of research defined from the outside. It is a living field of knowledge produced through the voices, languages, concepts, worlds of meaning, emotional registers, symbols, ritual practices and historical memories of Alevis themselves.

For this reason, the Alevi Encyclopedia does not limit itself to explaining Alevism through academic categories alone. It also contributes to the efforts of Alevi society to establish, protect and transmit its own knowledge regime to future generations. The project aims to build a relationship based on mutual respect between academic knowledge and the oral, ritual and experiential knowledge of Alevi communities. In this way, Alevi knowledge can be processed reliably according to scholarly standards, while also being represented through its own internal concepts, values and sensitivities.

PRESERVING HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE, ORAL MEMORY AND THE ALEVI KNOWLEDGE WORLD

Throughout history, Alevism has faced serious threats, including forced assimilation, political and religious pressure, social exclusion, massacres, the destruction of cultural heritage and the fragmentation of collective knowledge. For this reason, the accurate understanding, preservation, documentation and transmission of Alevi cultural heritage is of great importance.

The Alevi Encyclopedia approaches this heritage not only through written sources, but also through oral tradition, ritual practices, the narratives of Alevi religious and spiritual knowledge holders, local memory, sacred places, music, deyişes, ocaks, süreks and diaspora experiences. The project understands Alevi knowledge as a living field of memory and seeks to support its transmission across generations, languages, geographies and communities of belief.

Alevi cultural heritage does not live only in texts. It also lives in speech, voice, body, ritual, place, symbol, emotion and intergenerational transmission. For this reason, the Alevi Encyclopedia pays particular attention to making visible Alevism’s own world of meaning, symbolic universe, conceptual language and emotional memory. Concepts such as Hak, rıza, yol, erkân, cem, ocak, sürek, musahiplik, ikrar, zahir, batın, can, dem, delil, jiare, ziyaret, pir, ana, dede, baba and zakir are not merely words. They are carriers of the Alevi knowledge world. The Encyclopedia aims to explain these concepts within their own contexts and to make them understandable for future generations.

The video archive “Yol Önderlerinin Dilinden” was developed for this purpose. It documents the oral memory of pirs, anas, dedes, babas, seyits, zakirs and other Alevi knowledge holders. This archive is an important digital memory project that seeks to transmit to future generations the ritual, ethical, cosmological and social knowledge of Alevism that cannot be fully contained in written sources.

The documentation of narratives by Alevi knowledge holders who grew up in the European diaspora or who have carried out religious service in Europe for many years is especially important for recording more than sixty years of Alevi diaspora experience. The ways in which generations born, raised or educated in Germany relate to Alevism show that Alevi knowledge is now being reproduced in a multilingual and multi-sited world. The Alevi Encyclopedia is one of the pioneering initiatives that documents this transformation in a systematic way.

DIGITAL AND DYNAMIC CONTENT

As a digital platform, the Alevi Encyclopedia is designed not as a static project, but as a constantly developing and regularly updated field of knowledge. Published entries, videos and lecture materials will be expanded over time through new contributions, updated when necessary and made accessible in different languages.

In recent years, important initiatives have emerged to preserve Alevi cultural heritage, document oral memory, digitise archival materials and share Alevi knowledge through open-access platforms. Digital Alevi archives are not merely a matter of technical preservation and access. They also strengthen the ability of Alevi society to express its own past, concepts, rituals, emotions, symbols and forms of memory in its own language.

As one of the important actors in this new field of digital cultural heritage, the Alevi Encyclopedia aims to show that Alevi knowledge can be preserved together at academic, social and digital levels. Through encyclopedia entries, the video archive, open lectures, multilingual publishing and international academic collaborations, the project seeks not only to archive Alevi knowledge, but also to establish it as a living field of knowledge that is discussed, updated and transmitted across generations.

The digital structure makes it possible for Alevi knowledge not only to reach today’s readers, but also to be archived, preserved, catalogued and kept accessible for future generations in the long term. For this reason, the Alevi Encyclopedia aims to create a knowledge infrastructure for the preservation and transmission of Alevi cultural heritage in the digital age.

MULTILINGUAL ACCESS

The Alevi Encyclopedia is a multilingual platform publishing in Turkish, English and German. Multilingualism is understood not merely as a technical act of translation, but as a fundamental principle that enables Alevi knowledge to reach different generations, Alevi communities in the diaspora, international academic circles and the wider public.

Today, Alevi knowledge circulates across Turkish, German, English, Kırmancki, Kurmancî and other languages. This multilingual reality is especially important for younger generations living in the European diaspora. By publishing in different languages, the Alevi Encyclopedia aims not only to preserve Alevi cultural heritage, but also to support its understanding, discussion and appropriation by new generations.

Multilingualism is also important for the epistemic autonomy of Alevi knowledge. Alevism lives not only within dominant academic or official languages, but also within its own local languages, ritual concepts, forms of oral transmission and community memories. For this reason, the Alevi Encyclopedia seeks to make visible the conceptual worlds of Alevism in different languages, to explain these concepts as far as possible within their own contexts and to contribute to the development of a multilingual Alevi knowledge field.

CONTRIBUTORS

The Alevi Encyclopedia is a collective, international and interdisciplinary knowledge production project. Contributions to the Encyclopedia come not only from academics, but also from Alevi religious and spiritual knowledge holders, pirs, anas, dedes, babas, seyits, zakirs, researchers, writers, translators, editors, intellectuals, representatives of younger generations and volunteers.

One of the most important pillars of the project is its broad Scientific Advisory Board, which brings together leading researchers from different generations in the field of Alevi Studies. Composed of nearly one hundred academics, researchers and specialists, this board strengthens the scholarly quality, pluralist approach and international academic visibility of the Alevi Encyclopedia. The Scientific Advisory Board brings together expertise from fields such as history, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, theology, political science, cultural studies, migration studies, musicology, memory studies, gender studies and digital humanities.

The Alevi Encyclopedia also has an international and interdisciplinary editorial structure that represents different areas of work within the project. This structure coordinates activities in fields such as encyclopedia entries, oral history and the video archive, open lectures, translation, copy-editing, digital archiving, multilingualism, academic collaborations and cultural heritage work. In this way, the Encyclopedia is shaped not by a single group of editors, but by the shared labour of different areas of expertise and working groups.

This plural model of contribution is essential for reflecting the richness and diversity of the Alevi cultural world. The Alevi Encyclopedia aims to be an open, participatory and responsible knowledge platform that brings together the voices of different Alevi communities, ocaks, süreks, languages, geographies and diaspora experiences.

This approach enables Alevi knowledge to be understood not only as an object of research defined from the outside, but as a living field of knowledge produced through the voices, languages, concepts, worlds of meaning, emotional registers, symbols, ritual practices and historical memories of Alevis themselves. The contribution model of the Alevi Encyclopedia seeks to establish a relationship of mutual respect between academic knowledge and community-based knowledge.

The ultimate aim of the Alevi Encyclopedia is to carry Alevi knowledge from the present into the future through scholarly standards, community-based responsibility, multilingual access, international academic collaboration and the possibilities offered by the digital age.