Summary
One of the earliest and most important Bektāshī religious building complexes in the Balkans, Ak Yazılı Baba tekke possesses a distinct shared scared landscape and in the late Ottoman era became a fully-fledged dual veneration site. Literary and historical testimonies, archaeological and material culture data, oral histories present a rich array of sacred stories, rites of passage and cultic observances which blend Islamic mystical and popular Christian religiosity centred on the tekke’s shared environment. A current absence of religious authority at the site and lack of religio-political exploitation of its significance has generated novel syncretistic transmutations in its complex, focused on the universalism of spirituality and perennialism.   

Yuri Stoyanov (PhD, The Warburg Institute, University of London) is based at SOAS, University of London. A Senior Fellow at the Albright Institute, Jerusalem, his current assignments include visiting professorships at several universities in Europe and Asia; his past assignments include Oxford, British Academy and Wingate fellowships, and Directorship of the British Academy Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. He is on the editorial board of several international academic journals and institutions. His English-language publications include The Hidden Tradition in Europe (Penguin Books, 1994), The Other God (Yale University Press, 2000), Defenders and Enemies of the True Cross (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2011) and edited volumes. Since 2000 he has worked on a series of research projects and organized several international initiatives and workshops (supported by British and Italian academic institutions and involving wide-ranging field work) focused on the status of religious sites and cultural/archaeological reserve areas as well as religious minorities in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia.