The migration of ever growing numbers of Turkish speakers into Southwest Asia from the late fourth/tenth century onwards and also into Asia Minor after the battle of Mentzikert in 463/1073 and the subsequent formation of Turkish Islamic polities in Anatolia beginning the sixth/twelfth century generated the social and cultural conditions for the development of a distinct Islamic literary tradition in the Western Turkish vernacular. This tradition, leavened with Persian Sufi prose and poetry, had unmistakably mystical hues from its inception, but it was only in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that full-blown Sufi discourses began to take shape. While the generic boundaries and literary characteristics of some of these vernacular works are relatively clear - as in the literary corpus of Y?nus Emre (possibly d.720/1320) and ‘A??k Pa?a (d.733/1333), and thus their social and cultural functions are not too difficult to make out, other Turkish Sufi voices, protean in nature and bafflingly variegated in tone, register as well as lexicon, continue to defy attempts to subject them to literary and cultural historical analysis. The rich and complex corpus of Kaygusuz Abdal (d. first half of the fifteenth century) is a case in point. This most colorful and prolific poet/author’s mystical discourse remains understudied, no doubt partly because his works –in prose, verse as well as mixed prose and poetry in the form of monologues, inner dialogs, visions, sermons, and didactic epistles - do not easily lend themselves to literary and historical analysis. This paper will be the initial step of a larger project to draw a religious and cultural portrait of this key Sufi figure. I have already read through his corpus, and I will argue that Kaygusuz Abdal was instrumental in the development of a distinctly “provincial” and “latitudinarian” Sufi discourse in Turkish that explicitly and consciously situated itself against the perceived “metropolitan” and “authoritarian” discourses and practices of institutional Sufis who lived in large urban centers. It is my hope that this new perspective on early Sufi works in vernacular Turkish will enable us to extend the evidentiary basis for the study of Anatolian Sufi communities to include sources such as the output of Kaygusuz Abdal that have hitherto largely defied scholarly analysis and thus remained neglected.