The shrine and its courtyard
Abdal Musa founded his tekke at Tekke village in the Elmalı district, in a region then settled by Türkmen and Yörük communities among whom Bektashism flourished; the village itself grew as a settlement endowed to the lodge. Over the following centuries the dervish house expanded into a fully-fledged Bektashi centre (âsitâne) with rich endowments. Evliya Çelebi, who visited in 1671, described a complex ringed by gardens and orchards, with guesthouses, storehouses, kitchens, a mosque, running water and pavilions, fed by a well of water believed to heal the sick, and claimed that the fire in the lodge's kitchen had never once gone out since the day it was lit.↗↗↗↗
Most of that vast complex did not survive. After the Janissary corps was abolished in 1826 and the Bektashi order banned, the lodge was shut, its possessions sold and its assets dispersed; the buildings were revived under Sultan Abdülaziz in 1874 and again under Abdülhamid II and a sheikh named Yusuf Baba in 1910, but over time the ancillary structures crumbled. Today the domed tomb that the complex was built around is essentially all that still stands.↗↗↗
That surviving tomb is a small architectural gem. Built in the second half of the 14th century in the Seljuk kümbet tradition, likely during the Tekeoğulları beylik period, it has a square prayer chamber roofed by a dome that rises from squinch arches inside and an octagonal drum outside, hidden beneath an eight-sided pyramidal stone cone. The walls are finely laid cut stone, pierced by a single doorway and a few small, low windows, with two poetic inscription panels near the entrance recording the 1874 revival and the 1910 repair.↗↗
Inside lie five plain, unmarked sarcophagi (sanduka): the largest, at the centre and enclosed by an openwork brass lattice, is Abdal Musa's own, with a green head-cord at its head to signal his descent from the Prophet. Around it rest his mother, his father Seyyid Hasan Gazi, his sister and Kaygusuz Abdal; along the wall a grave space is left reserved for the Mehdi. During the 1968 repair by the General Directorate of Foundations, a cloak and a wooden sword attributed to Abdal Musa were placed on display here in a glass case. The tomb was registered as a protected monument in 1990 and last restored in 2019.↗↗↗
Outside, the hazire—the lodge's courtyard cemetery—is where many visitors linger longest. It holds some 150 graves belonging to successive lodge heads, dervishes, cooks, shrine-keepers and their families; about forty carry inscriptions from the Ottoman era, the earliest dated to 1699, the rest ranging through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Because Bektashi headstones were deliberately smashed alongside those of the Janissaries after 1826, the surviving carved stones and their distinctive headpieces are rare and precious witnesses to the lodge's long community life.↗↗