Memorie.al / Bektashism is a mystical sect (order), more mysterious than the great monotheistic religions. It is shrouded in the mists of history. Ali, the fourth caliph, who is the “prophet” of the Bektashi sect (in terms of importance, some place him after Muhammad, others beside him), is believed to be a historical figure, as are his sons Hasan and Hysen, as well as the twelve famous imams, but immediately afterwards the darkness begins. It is somewhat strange, because as a rule, the later an event appears or occurs in history, the more illuminated it turns out to be. With Bektashism, the opposite has happened. About Haxhi Bektashi, the founder of the Bektashi order, less is known than about Ali and his sons, who lived 600-700 years earlier.
It is said (there is no historical document proving it: it is simply the Bektashis who claim it) that Haxhi Bektashi was born in the 13th century, somewhere in Iran, and later moved to Anatolia, to the village of Kirshehir. Even about Balim Sultan, who gave a concrete form to this order, who spread and codified the creeds, practices, rituals and hierarchical ranks, and who created the first large flock of believers (he is for the Bektashis what Saint Paul is for Christians), nothing more is known; he lived until the beginning of the 16th century. About large Albanian families, more or less from the same time, much more is known.
We Albanian Bektashis feel most connected to Sari Salltiku, who lived in the 13th century, the century of Haxhi Bektashi. Data on his origin and life are chaotic and contradictory, but Albanians, it is not understood by what path, have made him “their own” saint, and hold to the opinion that he is the one who brought Bektashism to us. How? Why? When? The answer is given only by a legend, which the people of Kruja told Alexandre Degrand, the French consul in Shkodra at the end of the 20th century, who visited the supposed tomb of Sari Salltik in their city: “A seven-headed dragon became a great trouble for the inhabitants of Kruja, and for one of their unnamed princes, who was also the father of a beautiful daughter, because every day it demanded a local inhabitant for its dinner.
Thus, every evening, a man from Kruja was seen climbing up the mountain to go to the top, to the cave where the man-eating creature lived. When the turn came for the prince’s daughter, suddenly a white-bearded dervish appeared. This was Sari Salltiku. Upon learning what was happening, he took the girl and set off for the cave. On the way, he stopped for a while and asked her to clean the lice he had picked up during the journey. He placed his head in the girl’s lap, who was not yet ready to trust his sudden kindness. She was trembling like a leaf.
She did not understand what was happening. One thought told her that the old man was a dragon of his own kind, and that she had thus fallen from the rain into the hail. But she feared in vain. Sari Salltiku was her guardian angel. He took that path not to get some morsel of his own flesh by kindness, but to go tooth and nail with the dragon. And he cut off all seven heads. In return, the prince offered him his daughter as a wife, but the dervish, reading a lack of desire in the girl’s eyes, replied that ‘dervishes cannot take a wife without her consent.’
He went to live in the dragon’s cave, but his lonely life there was a frightening déjà vu for the inhabitants of Kruja, who for this reason decided to kill him. Sari Salltiku got wind of the news and became furious with spite. He mounted a mule, which had to take four steps to carry him to Corfu, where he died after some time. The mule’s hoofprints are believed to have remained in Kruja, Shijak, and Durrës.” It is not understood why he made the first steps small (Kruja-Shijak, Shijak-Durrës), and the last step so large (from Durrës to Corfu). It is also not well understood how Sari Salltiku’s body was found buried in Kruja, whose inhabitants wanted to kill him. Mysteries of legends.
But let us leave the tales aside for a moment. Bektashism was most likely brought to these parts by the Janissaries, who were commonly Albanians, Bosnians, and other Balkan Slavs recruited as children under the Devshirme system, a practice of abducting children from Christian families with the aim of making them Muslim soldiers. A revival of the order was noticed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and here Ali Pasha Tepelena must have lent a hand.
There is no evidence that he himself was a Bektashi, let alone a devout one, but many believe that he promoted Bektashism for his own purposes. During this period, many tekkes were built, including that of Prishta in Skrapar, which is one of the most important in the history of Bektashism in Albania. Mit’hat Frashëri, in fact, somewhat shifts the construction of this tekke in time. He says it was built in 1855. By Baba Tahiri.
Just when it was thought that Bektashism was gaining strength, disaster struck. On June 15, 1826 (Ali Pasha was no longer in this world), Sultan Mahmud II put the Janissaries to the sword. That is a metaphorical way of saying “put to the sword,” because in reality the carnage was caused with firearms. About four thousand Janissaries, who had turned into a state within a state, died that day. A few weeks later, by means of a sultan’s decree, the Bektashi Order was banned.
Anyone known to be a member was persecuted. In Albania, the Bektashis survived nonetheless, and waited for better times, which came in the second half of the century. When the efforts of the National Renaissance figures began to awaken Albanians from their sleep or to raise the Albanian nation from the ruins, the Bektashis had recovered and played an extraordinary patriotic role.
They were also favored because they were a “religion” not tied to any of the great powers or neighboring countries. Catholics were entangled with Austrians and Italians, Orthodox with Serbs in the north and Greeks in the south, and Sunni Muslims with Turks. The Bektashis “belonged only to their own nation.” And they strove to turn their faith into a national religion. They were inspired by Naim Frashëri, but also inspired him. Many Albanians learned from him what this sect was. But Naim himself invented Bektashism more than he interpreted or expounded it.
His Bektashism resembles a naive, sensual, liberated religion, without clear and sharp rules – in short, a religion that suits Albanians, who want neither to spoil themselves on earth nor God in heaven, but at the same time protects important principles and values that someone has made a cornerstone, without bothering to legitimize them with any doctrinal source of their own. They behave more like the essence of human wisdom through the centuries, rather than a coherent religious system. What is it about? Such principles and values are best revealed by the following Naimian phrases:
“You ate one morsel? Give the other morsel to him who has nothing to eat”; or “Do not leave a mother without an infant, nor an infant without a mother”; or “When a daughter is born to you, do not feel weak, [because] one is the same, the son and the daughter, the man and the woman”; or “Little ones are not educated by beating and scolding, but with kindness, gentleness, wisdom”; or “For those who work, there is no poverty, because God has blessed work”; or “There is no worse person in life than the traitor of the nation and the homeland”; or “Whoever gives to the poor, lends to God”; or “Do not do to others what you do not wish them to do to you” (the Golden Rule known in all major cultures of the world); or “Those who believe in the true God, the immortality of the soul, and do good deeds, the great God loves them, whether they are Muslims, Christians, or Israelites…”; or “You Muslims, do not speak with Christians and Israelites except with the most beautiful of words”; or “[O men], if you do not wish to stray from what is right, take only one wife, for God did not give man two hearts.”
It seems he has put together the good features and noble aspects of all doctrines and civilizations: solidarity, respect for family, gender equality, opposition to violence, the cult of work, patriotism, interfaith tolerance, monogamy, etc.
Another important figure of Bektashism is Abas Ali, who is honored lavishly at the top of Mount Tomor, where his grave is said to be. Every late August, thousands of pilgrims of the Bektashi faith hold their breath there. They go in groups, boys and girls, often as families. They buy a sheep in the surrounding villages, or even there on the spot, where there are whole herds of livestock. They give it to someone to cook, but some do everything themselves: slaughter it, hang it somewhere, skin it, put it on a spit, and roast it over an open fire. The top of Tomor is taken over those days by boys and girls who drink, shout, sing, and make love amidst the blood of the livestock. Before or after this revelry, they never forget to toss some coins near the supposed tomb of Abas Ali.
Thus, the Bektashis believe that the hero of Karbala has his bones laid to rest at Kulmak. But history says otherwise: “Abas Ali, the son that the famous caliph Ali had with his second wife (after his first, Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, died), mounted his horse, broke through the siege of Yazid’s supporters, and went to fill water from a spring near the Euphrates, because his own people, especially the women and children, among them a granddaughter named Sakina whom he loved very much, were suffering from thirst. As he returned with the full water-skin, although thirst burned him, he did not drink a single sip, because it seemed to him unjust and cowardly to drink water before Sakina.
Yazid’s soldiers shot him in the back and took one arm; as he threw the water-skin to the other arm, they shot him again, damaging that arm as well; he nevertheless managed to grab the water-skin with his teeth, until a penultimate arrow fell upon the vessel itself and all the water spilled to the ground; this caused him pain in the soul, because his mission had failed and the besieged children were drying up from thirst, but a final arrow did not give him time to live with that suffering; it struck him in the eye and pierced his head from side to side, and after that Abas Ali fell from his horse and lay flat on the ground, where he gave up his spirit. It is the year 680 AD, and the year 61 AH.”
It was Sami Frashëri, in his encyclopedic work ‘Kamus al-alam’, who innocently adhered to the thesis that Abas Ali’s tomb is on Tomor. And others after him, because they liked this legend, kept it alive. In one of his articles, referring to Margaret Hasluck, who was on top of Tomor in 1930, Jorgo Bulo says that Albanian Bektashis make another, not at all legendary, connection between Abas Ali and Mount Tomor: “A dervish named Haxhi Babai, seeing pilgrims climbing Tomor every mid-August to pray to a pagan deity, went to Karbala, took a handful of earth from the real tomb of Abas Ali, brought it to the top of the mountain, and the place where he threw it, he consecrated as the second tomb of the saint.”
The Bektashis have not paid much attention to those who defend this version, which essentially flattens somewhat the symbolism of their pilgrimage. It is one thing to go and pray before the bones of a saint, and quite another to go and pray before a handful of earth taken from his tomb, which is thousands of kilometers away, somewhere near Baghdad, on the banks of the Euphrates.
Evliya Çelebi speaks of Mount Tomor, “two hours south of Berat, where highly sought-after medicinal plants grow, used by doctors from Latinistan and the West, and where it is worth going for picnics and hunting,” but he never refers to it as a holy place for Bektashis, although he does not forget to speak about the latter.
Likewise, the French geologist Ami Boué and the English historian William Martin Leake, who traveled much later in the lands inhabited by Albanians, do not speak of the “holy mountain”. Like Çelebi, the Frenchman mentions Tomor, also mentions the Bektashis, but has not noticed any connection between them. While the Englishman was himself on Tomor, right at the top, while making his way from Korça to Berat. He left travel notes. He speaks of a “pilgrimage” that took place in August (also in June and July), but it refers to that of the Vlach shepherds of Myzeqeja (Mizakia), who took their livestock to the high summer pastures of Tomor.
And the only connection of this mountain with religion in the memoirs of the Briton passionate about antiquity can be found in a proestos (monk or priest) of Tomor, with the surname Papa, who had died some time ago. He mentions him because, forced by the pouring rain, he lodged in his house, where others now lived. Surprisingly, neither did Henry Fanshawe Tozer come around to the idea that Tomor was a center for Bektashis. He was not on that mountain, but spoke about it. More precisely, the people of Berat spoke to him about it. And to distinguish it as special, they mentioned the fact that on its peak there is perpetual snow, and that they used that snow instead of ice for their needs at the dinner table.
Only Antonio Baldacci, who was there in the 1890s, mentioned “the peak of Abas Ali”. How is it possible that neither Çelebi in the 17th century, nor Boué, Martin Leake, and Fanshawe Tozer in the early 19th century, spoke about the Bektashi festival?! This is a question that has no answer for now, but the likelihood is that the Bektashis “made Tomor their own” at the end of the 19th century. Shortly after, exactly in 1916 (according to Mit’hat Frashëri), the Tekke of Abas Ali was built. By Dervish Iljazi.
The pilgrimage to that mountaintop is an ancient ritual, however. William Martin Leake tells us that Tomor, which in earlier publications is mentioned by the name Tomaros, is the “Throne of the Gods” and the location of the temple of Dodona. Naim Frashëri has versified this claim: “Herodotus says / That once long ago / On Tomor stood / The house of God.” Sami Frashëri, likewise, has shown that he enjoyed believing that Mount Tomaros, described by ancient authors, was Mount Tomor.
“Tomor is Dodona, the place where the temple of the Pelasgians stood,” says Sami, but on the other hand there are many others, perhaps the majority, who think that the real Tomaros spoken of is a mountain near Ioannina, and Dodona, along with its oracle so mentioned by ancient authors, is nearby. While Çajupi, although an Orthodox from Sheper in Zagoria, has sung to Father Tomor like no other. He opens his poem with these verses: “To you people came from old / to learn what God commands / to you I also pray in tears / to learn what he says about Albanians.” Then, he makes the mountain speak and give advice to Albanians, who have forgotten their homeland and are divided by religions. Although he calls it the throne of God, he addresses Tomor as if it were God himself.
In all likelihood, Father Tomor was an Illyrian pagan god. Albanologist Maximilian Lambertz recounts the legend that existed about Father Tomor, and says, among other things, that he, Tomor, in the role of a mythological character, fell in love with the most beautiful woman on earth, whom he kept during the night, and at dawn, entrusted her to the wind to take her to her sister, the most beautiful of the seas; Father Tomor also took Berat under his protection, and for this he fought fiercely with “Father” Shpiragu, inflicting many wounds on each other, which are nothing other than the ravines and gullies that descend their slopes today; while the tears of the most beautiful woman on earth, who helplessly watched that duel, created the river Osum.
A similar fable is recounted by Eqrem bey Vlora who, while explaining and interpreting popular beliefs in Toskëria, speaks of Tomor and Shpirag as two giants. “Tomor struck with his sword, and Shpirag clubbed him with a mace, and as punishment God petrified them as two mountains facing each other. The gorges and abysses are nothing but the wounds they received,” writes Eqrem Vlora in his notes, titled “From Berat to Tomor and Back”.
There also exists an oral tradition that speaks of a church of Saint Mary on Mount Tomor and of the pilgrimage of Orthodox believers on August 15, the day of Saint Mary of August, which is the feast in honor of the day when the door to paradise was opened for the Blessed Lady. But this story, which loads their place of worship with various symbolisms, did not spoil things for the Bektashis.
On the contrary, there could not be a more suitable place of worship for them, who are part of a sect where “narratives, legends, superstitions, magical practices, techniques of ecstasy, and Manichean approaches” (according to Abdulkadir Haasi), “pagan, Greek, Christian, Zoroastrian, Mazdean, Jewish, and likely Buddhist cults” (according to John Kingsley Birge), “ancient, pre-Turkic, pre-Islamic and Islamic elements” (according to Ahmet Jashar Oçaku), and – when it comes to Albania – “an Albanian temperament, which has given Bektashism such a form that in the foreground stands social organization, behavior, liberal ideas, not the religious-superstitious side or formal dogmas of the religion” (according to Margaret Hasluck). /Memorie.al
