Yeliz Teber has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to pursue her project on the Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi communities and their cultural heritage from the Ottoman period. Historically labelled as ‘heretics’, the Kilzilbash/Alevis-Bektashis were among the most religiously non-mainstream, socially non-conformist, and politically dissident dervish and ʿAlid groups in the Ottoman Empire. Today, they constitute the largest religious minority in Sunni-majority Turkey, with smaller groups remaining in the Balkans. Despite their significant presence, their history has remained a marginal niche in Islamic and Ottoman studies.
Aiming to address this gap, Yeliz’s project focuses on the principal Alevi-Bektashi convent in Turkey — the shrine of Hacı Bektaş — with the title 'The Collection of the Hacı Bektaş Shrine: Writing Cultural History from the Margins'. The project aims to provide the first comprehensive and contextual study of the only surviving collection from an Alevi-Bektashi shrine, which is also one of the best-preserved shrine collections in the Islamic world. Although the artefacts preserved in this collection form a substantial body of textual, visual, and material evidence originating from an identified Sufi-ʿAlid shrine of the Islamic/Ottoman world, most are virtually unknown in international scholarship. Studying this collection will offer securely contextualised, comparative material for the scholarship of Islamic art history and material culture.
Yeliz began her project in 2023, focusing on the seals and amulets in the Hacı Bektaş collection, generously supported by the Barakat Trust. With her new Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship from 2024 to 2027, she aims to study all surviving artefacts in the collection, including an extensive manuscript library, portrait paintings, calligraphic panels, various items of dervish attire, as well as daily and liturgical objects such as seals and amulets. She plans to compile these rich sources into a database, contributing to the preservation of this largely neglected cultural heritage of the Alevis-Bektashis. In addition to the database, she intends to publish a catalogue of the collection to introduce it to Islamic and Ottoman historical studies, alongside a monograph exploring its role in the identity formation of the Alevis-Bektashis.
