Mapping the Vilayetname Manuscript Tradition in Space, Time, and Culture
2024–2025
RFD22
This 18-month project set out to understand how the Vilayetname, the fifteenth-century Turkish hagiography of the thirteenth-century Anatolian Sufi saint Hacı Bektaş Veli, circulated and took shape through manuscript practices into the twentieth century. While the Vilayetname is often treated as a single, stable text, its manuscript record tells a much more dynamic story. By tracing when, where, and by whom it was copied by hand, the project examines how the tradition evolved within a network of mystical, communal, and regional environments—most prominently among Bektashi communities, but also in Alevi spheres and across broader Ottoman manuscript cultures. The central question was how this widely read work traveled through space and time, and what its transmission reveals about changing literary, devotional, and social conditions.
The project involved first assembling a comprehensive digital corpus. Over the course of the project, I expanded my existing corpus of Vilayetname manuscripts, bringing the total to 101 digitised copies, sourced from libraries, archives, and private holdings across ten countries: Turkey, Germany, the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Albania, North Macedonia, the USA, and Canada. For each manuscript, extensive metadata were recorded, including date, provenance, scribal notes, codicological features, and the Vilayetname’s placement within multi-text volumes. This corpus-building phase has created the most extensive dataset yet for studying the work as an evolving product of manuscript practice rather than a fixed textual artefact.
Analysis of the corpus generated many new insights. The manuscripts show that the hagiography was transmitted in diverse and evolving forms—a prose version, three separate versifications, and a hybrid prose-verse form—and that this transmission resulted in revealing variation in content and rich paratexts that shed light on how readers and scribes interacted with the work. The project mapped how the Vilayetname manuscript tradition extended throughout the Ottoman realm, from the Middle East to the Balkans to the island of Crete, manifesting both in manuscripts circulating within Bektashi lodge networks and in those embedded in eclectic Sufi or local devotional compilations. One cluster of manuscripts even appears to have been produced in Buda (present-day Budapest) during the Ottoman occupation and was later dispersed to various university libraries in Europe following the fall of Ottoman rule in 1686. Patterns of textual variation, reuse, and compilation point to a tradition that was flexible and continually adapted, shaped not only by Bektashi readers and scribes but also by the broader Ottoman manuscript ecology. These findings have been illustrated through maps and timelines that visualise the tradition’s geographical reach and chronological span.
During the project, I engaged regularly with Research Field D, (Re-)Shaping Written Artefacts, which examined how written artefacts change over time and accumulate layers through use, reuse, and recontextualisation. Its focus on multilayered written artefacts—whose histories can resemble archaeological strata—offered a productive comparative framework for thinking about the layers of variation discernible among manuscripts of the Vilayetname tradition. Discussions in the group helped situate the Vilayetname corpus within a broader understanding of how texts are reshaped across their life cycles.
The project’s results were also shared through several external scholarly activities. Two conference papers presented in 2025 drew directly on the findings: “Who Was Writing the Life of Hacı Bektaş? Bektashis, Alevis, and Ottomans in the Vilayetname Manuscript Tradition” (Second Biennial International Conference of Alevism Studies, London) and “Writing Changes: The Late Ottoman Sufi Atmosphere in Bektashi Manuscripts” (Changing Conditions, Changing Discourse: Bektashis and Other Sufis in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, LMU Munich). Both papers highlighted how manuscript evidence reframes the social settings in which Hacı Bektaş’s life was written, copied, and reimagined.
The project has already begun to yield written outcomes. The article “The Vilayetname Manuscript Tradition and the Matter of Verse,” published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 11/2 (2024), examines how poetic materials circulated within and alongside prose versions of the Vilayetname, shedding light on the evolution of the manuscript tradition and the creative practices of compilers and scribes that shaped it. A further study in Turkish, “Bir Eserin Yazma Geleneği ve Aydınlattıkları: Vilâyetnâme Örneği,” will appear shortly and develops a conceptual framework for understanding the manuscript tradition as a relational and evolving cultural practice.
Together, the assembled corpus, the metadata, and the project’s analytical results provide a foundation for future work, including a broader interpretive monograph: a cultural history of the Vilayetname as it evolved through the manuscript tradition that gave it form and sustained it over time. The materials gathered during this project will support sustained research into how a saint and his hagiography were continually re-presented through the cultural practices of manuscript writing.
People
Project lead: Mark Soileau