Bektashi was an order of dervishes, largely held to be of the Shia branch of the Muslim faith founded, according to tradition, by Hajji Bektash Wali of Khorasan, in present-day Iran, in the thirteenth century and given definitive form by Balim, a sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. The order was independent from orthodox Islam and it included traditional folk elements in its doctrines and rituals. The order grew out of saint-veneration and the system of convents into a syncretistic unity, combining elements from many sources, vulgar, heterodox, and esoteric; ranging from the popular cults of central Asia and Anatolia, both Turkish and Christian Rumi, to the doctrines of the Hurufis. The Bektashis composed some beautiful Sufi poetry. Bektashis continue to exist in the Balkans, primarily in Albania, where their chief monastery was at Tirana, though the order was officially disestablished in 1925 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
