From at least the sixteenth century the Bektashi order became closely bound to an institution far from any dervish lodge: the Ottoman Janissary corps, the sultan's elite infantry, whose soldiers widely adopted Bektashi affiliation as an informal regimental faith. The relationship gave the order unusual reach into Ottoman military and political life, but it also tied the order's fortunes to the corps' own, a link that proved fatal to both in 1826.
When Sultan Mahmud II moved to abolish the Janissaries by force that year, in what Ottoman history remembers as the Auspicious Incident, the Bektashi order was suppressed in the same sweep, its lodges closed and its property confiscated as a suspected source of the corps' resistance to reform.
The order recovered across the following century only to be banned again, along with every other Sufi order in the country, under the Turkish Republic's secularizing reforms of 1925.
Albania, where Bektashism had put down deep roots under Ottoman rule and where it remains one of the country's recognized religious communities, became the order's effective centre of gravity outside Turkey, though communist Albania suppressed all religion between 1967 and 1990 in turn. Since the fall of that government the order has operated openly from Tirana, where its World Headquarters, the Kryegjyshata Boterore Bektashiane, now leads a following spread across Albania, Turkey's Alevi communities and the wider Balkans, still marked by initiates' traditional teslim tasi pendant and by the order's long standing distance from strict Sunni orthodoxy.
Sources Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923Caroline Finkel with Sufism: A Global HistoryNile Green