This paper discusses the efforts at preserving and reviving a festival, Commemoration of Topcu Baba, which is a marker of Alevi-Bektashi identity in eastern Thrace during the second half of the twentieth century. Utilizing secondary sources and field work completed in Turkey, in this paper I examine how festive culture has facilitated the revival and recovery of some aspects of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition in new, festive forms. All around the world, festivals, celebrations, and commemorations bring people together for a variety of purposes. They often provide a cheerful and lively environment, and/or opportunities for thrilling, therapeutic, or cathartic experiences. The figurative space created by cyclical and recurrent festive cultural practices has become a significant site for reaffirming collective identities. Regular recurrence of festive events, repetition of ritualistic acts, and reiteration of performances establish the process for social change. In the past, festivals helped to normalize and internalize modernity through several traditions, sometimes borrowed from antiquity, sometimes invented anew. Because of this, festive culture has been a very significant site for construction of new identities, such as national identities, as well as for the maintenance of traditional, communal identities that have come under pressure due to social change. In the modern era, festivals have played an important role in the production of traditions that stabilized societies in times of deep crises. “Invented traditions” that fill the festive space are intentionally constructed phenomena with an anonymous and ambiguous nature at times. The focus of this paper, the Commemoration of Topcu Baba, is an example of how unofficially organized social groups often practiced the socially invented traditions within the festive culture in order to construct new identities as well as revive and maintain older ones. Alevi-Bektashi faith, a minority religious practice in Turkey, is often presented as a heterodox Shiite tradition with diverse characteristics. During the second half of the century, Turkey experienced a very high rate of migration from rural to urban areas during the 1950s and 1960 and lost the connection to their spiritual guides and traditions. In this process, communal veneration of Topcu Baba has come to a halt during 1970s and faced complete disappearance from the Alevi-Bektashi cultural context. However, communal efforts to preserve the local tradition resulted in the innovation of the veneration of Topcu Baba as a public festival and demonstrated the importance of festive culture in adapting to large scale social transformations and preserving cultural traditions.