SSaint
Sayyid Battal Ghazi
(may God be pleased with him)
A historical commander of the Umayyad-Byzantine wars who became, in the Turkish epic tradition, a warrior-saint . His real name was Abdullah . Battal is not a name but an epithet denoting his martial prowess. The sources differ about his patronymic and the origin of his family: some say he was of Arab descent; Ibn al-Athīr, on the other hand, holds that he descended from manumitted clients attached to the Umayyads. He was active in the eighth century under Umayyad rule, and particularly between 717 and 740 , in the Umayyad-Byzantine conflicts in Anatolia. He is likely to have taken part in the siege of Constantinople of 717 under the command of Maslama b. Abd al-Malik. His campaigns are concentrated on Caesarea, Afyon and Eskişehir and on the regions of al-Jazīra and Syria — that is, in the places where Byzantine-Muslim warfare actually occurred. He fell a martyr around 740 at Akroinon, near present-day Seyitgazi (Eskişehir), fighting against Byzantine forces. His Circle of Influence — Turkish sources, and particularly the Battalnâme , thought to have been composed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, transformed this Arab commander into a classic Turkish epic hero . Kalenderî, Bektashi and Alevi circles venerated him as a warrior-saint . His Tomb and Complex — The "discovery" of his grave in the Seljuk period — attributed to a dream seen by the mother of Alâeddin Keykubad — set in motion the building of a shrine and a culture of pilgrimage, and in time the settlement of Seyitgazi grew up around this centre.
