The complex at Hacıbektaş grew around a single small room. Its core is the Çilehane, also called the Kızılca Halvet, the retreat cell built in the thirteenth century in Hacı Bektaş Veli's own lifetime; everything else came later. After his death additions were made by a succession of Ottoman rulers beginning with Orhan Gazi and continuing through Murat Gazi, Bayezid I and Selim I, and the complex was completed in the sixteenth century. It was repaired by Mustafa IV in 1807, by Abdülaziz in 1862 and by Abdülhamid II in 1895, and that is the form it stands in today.
The Kültür Portalı records that the mystic was born in Khorasan in 1248 and died in 1337 at the place then called Sulucakarahöyük, the modern Hacıbektaş. He was trained in the tradition of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi and came to Anatolia by way of Iran, Iraq, Arabia and Syria; his road through Anatolia ran first to Antep and Antakya, then through Maraş and Sivas, on to Tokat and Amasya, and by way of Çorum and Yozgat to Kırşehir before he settled at Sulucakarahöyük. It was here that he spread a philosophy resting on tolerance, love of people and social equality.
The complex is laid out around three courtyards, in the manner of the old Turkish palaces, with each part placed according to what it was for. The first courtyard holds the laundry, a store and the Üçler fountain. The second holds the guest house, the assembly house, the pantry, the kitchen, the Dede Baba pavilion — now the museum offices — the kitchen-master's pavilion, the lodge mosque, the Lion Fountain and the assembly pool. The third holds the Atatürk corner, the Pir Evi section, the tomb of Balım Sultan, the burial ground and the private garden.
The order inside the pîr evi, the house of the master, was close to military. A unit was provided for every need and each was named in the vocabulary of the order: the guest house, the horse house, the bread house. Each was organised as an ocak, a hearth, headed by a baba, with dervishes under him, and all the babas answered to the dedebaba who held the post at the pîr evi. Those who wished to enter the order first served at the Hanbağı and Dedebağı farms attached to the house; if they passed the trials there they could rise to service within the pîr evi itself, beginning at the horse house.
The lodge was closed on 30 November 1925, together with the other dervish lodges, under law 677, and its contents were sent to the Ethnography Museum in Ankara. The Directorate General of Foundations restored the complex between 1957 and 1964, the objects were brought back, and it opened to visitors as an ethnography museum on 16 August 1964. Because the tomb is bound up directly with a belief system of international importance, and because the rituals and symbols of that system are worked into the architecture and the interior of the tomb itself, it was put forward for the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012.
Timing matters here more than at most museums. Visitor numbers rise from April and stay high into November, with June, July and August the busiest.
Getting there
- Access
- Hacıbektaş has Avanos to the east, Mucur in Kırşehir to the west, Gülşehir to the south and Kozaklı to the north.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Nevşehir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -0.1 °C in January to 21.4 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (58 mm) and lightest in August (8 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- Summer (1 April – 1 October) 08:00–19:00 · Winter (1 October – 1 April) 08:00–17:00
