Otman Baba
Straying from orthodox Islamic tenets, Otman Baba asserted his unity with God and his mastery of divine secrets—as the embodiment of monotheistic religious figures such as Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses.
Known manuscripts of the vilâyetname include a 260-page one transcribed by Şeyh Ömer (Umar) bin Dervish Ahmed in 1758 and one from the Bulgarian village of Gorna Krepost taken to Turkey with the Alevi emigrants.
[4] Another source is the work of Evliya Çelebi, which cites Otman Baba as a leader of ascetic dervishes[5] and a gazi (religious warrior) who helped conquer the Ottoman Empire's European province of Rumelia.
[8] While those outside his inner circle knew him as Otman Baba,[8] other dervishes and the aristocratic sayyids called him Şah-i Kerbelâ—a reference to the prophet Muhammad's grandson Husayn, who died in the Battle of Karbala.
[10] Otman Baba's proselytizing in the Eastern Balkans and Anatolia coincides with the settlements of the nomadic Yürüks, who were hostile toward the Ottoman bureaucracy[11][12] that forcibly recruited them as soldiers.
[8] He performed his first miracle in the Balkans in Babaeski, extinguishing a candlestick's flame that had been lit by the mystic Sarı Saltık Baba, proving his sainthood to ordinary followers of Sufism.
[11] Otman Baba travelled through the eastern foothills of Stara Planina, following Sufi doctrine by surviving on leaves and wild fruit as he meditated on God.
[24] Gramatikova dates Otman Baba's arrival in Constantinople to 1456, where he contributed to the charitable activities of every imaret and advocated the restoration of a fortress that he argued was the town of Hasan and Huseyn.
[6] Gramatikova states that Otman Baba followed the Khurasan-region Malamatiyya, a tradition characterized by its adherents' independence of a director, a school, or conventional religious laws.
Furthermore, Otman Baba asserted that he—as a kutb—had mastered divine secrets, regarding himself above Ottoman rulers and other mystics[4] and identifying himself as the religious and political figures Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Huseyn, Timur, and Sultan Mehmed II.
[30] Categorized by Markoff as a dervish branch of the Muslim Alevi (Alians), Qizilbash, and Shi'ites,[31] the Baba'is have preserved their traditions in Bulgaria through the cult of Otman Baba.
[1] In Nova Zagora, the Kizilbash venerate the life of Otman Baba,[32] considering him a local Shi'ite saint[33] and regarding his tekke as their primary holy place in Bulgaria.
[35] Although Otman Baba had rejected Mehmed II's offers to build him a tekke, the mystic's followers developed a cult complex around his grave, located at the southeastern part of the Hızırilyas hill in the Haskovo-region village of Teketo.
Evliya Çelebi reported a cloister near the Maden dere riverbank and credited Sultan Bayezid II for the construction of the tekke, which included a heptagonal refectory, shaped like a dervish cap and associated with the yediler (cult of the seven).
[36] Architectural historian Stephen Lewis also proposes the yediler symbolism of the seven-sided refectory—the türbe (mausoleum)—which he classifies as an early sixteenth-century Ottoman funerary monument, observing its domed structure and ashlar masonry.
