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Paper short abstract

Based on interviews with members of the Bektashi-Alevi community of Western Thrace, this paper explores the multi-layered mobilization of historical narratives and their role in the process of understanding and representing different facets of their communal identity.

Paper long abstract

Based on interviews with members of the Bektashi-Alevi community of Western Thrace, this paper explores the multi-layered mobilization of historical narratives and their role in the process of understanding and representing different facets of their communal identity. Within this process, a fragmented, quasi-historical landscapes of different aspects of communal self(s) emerges where the boundaries between myth and history blur.

In this context, mythic narratives are often articulated as non- questionable historical facts, while well- established historical events might appear blurred, hastened, obsured, contested and ultimately resolved when subjectivities converge to factualities through discussion. The paper discusses how these diverse levels of narrating the past allow multiple, and often shifting, interpretations of communal self-representation and self-understaning. Ultimately, I argue that Bektashi-Alevi historicity is characterized by these overlapping layers of mythical and historical narratives. Myth, large-scale history, personal accounts, anecdotal stories and communal memories constitute a multi faceted construction for articulating the present through a non-linear and non-cohesive past