TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

at a story of the velâyetnâme attributed to Hacı Bektaş, what we see is not the historical
event that took place during the lifetime of Hacı Bektaş; rather these metaphoric stories
convey to us the traits of thousands of utterances – traits of the sentiments, protests,
concerns, ideological and religious stands, and desires of singers and their audience -
which conducted them to the compiler.
Among a number of accounts suffice it to refer to three exemplary cases from
this genre. As is known well, most of the prominent religious figures who enjoyed
spiritual authority on the Turcoman society of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
Anatolia were later adopted by Bektashi tradition. Moving away from this established
acceptance, I shall have a closer look at the velâyetnâmes of three most exalted figures
of the Bektashi tradition.
The first one is the Velâyetnâme of Hacı Bektaş Veli, the attributed eponymous
founder of the Bektashi Order. Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı surmises from a textual criticism of
the velâyetnâme that the available text must have been compiled by Firdevsi towards the
end of the fifteenth century. 205 If this assumption is true, then the stories in the
velâyetnâme evolved in the collective memory over two centuries.
Even a cursory reading of the Velâyetnâme of Hacı Bektaş shows that the
memory of the intrinsic liaison between the ‘heterodox’ milieu and the frontier culture -
thus the early Ottomans - is strongly visible in the social memory of the late fifteenth-
century ‘heterodox’ circles. The velâyetnâme depicts Hacı Bektaş Veli as a saint not
only approving the political career of Osman but also favoring him among many other
205 Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, “Vilâyet-nâme ne vakit ve kimin tarafından yazılmıştır”, in Vilâyet-nâme.
Menâkıb-ı Hünkâr Hacı Bektâş-ı Veli, haz. Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Đstanbul: Đnkılap Kitabevi, 1995, pp.
XXVII-XXIX. (From now on Vilâyet-nâme). Later on, Gölpınarlı’s suggestion attained wide-spread
acceptance among scholars.
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