This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bektashi tradition itself calls Balim Sultan Pir-i Sani, second founder, a documented honorific distinct from any title claimed by Balim Sultan for himself, naming his reorganizing work as functionally equal in importance to Haji Bektash Veli's original founding rather than as a lesser, merely administrative follow-up to it. That the tradition chose the word founder rather than reformer or organizer for a figure who arrived two and a half centuries after the order's own beginning is documented as a deliberate equivalence rather than an accidental turn of phrase.
Haji Bektash Veli's own biography survives mostly as hagiography, a documented contrast with Balim Sultan's own record, whose reorganizing work is institutional history proper rather than legend, giving the order the grade structure, initiation rites and central lodge discipline that carried it forward. That one founding figure is remembered mainly through hagiographic legend while the other, honored with the same rank of founder, is remembered through documented institutional achievement is recorded as two genuinely different kinds of historical record standing behind the same title.
That Bektashi tradition awarded its second founder title to a reorganizer working from documented institutional history rather than legend, ranking him functionally equal to a founding figure remembered mainly through hagiography, marks the Pir-i Sani title as a documented case where an order judged institutional achievement worthy of the same honor as its own founding legend.