Since Fuad Köprülü, scholars tend to link various aspects of Anatolian religious history directly to Central Asia. This tendency is most salient in the study of so-called Turkish folk Islam and what is assumed to be its primary manifestation today, namely the Alevi-Bekta?i communities. Köprülü associated Turkish folk Islam, by definition heterodox, with Central Asian Shamanism as preserved and transmitted under the cover of popular Sufism, in particular that of the Central Asian Yeseviyye order. However, a new body of documents found in the private archives of members of the Alevi community, together with some recently discovered archival evidence, challenge the well-established theory of the Yesevi origins of proto-Alevism. They instead highlight the prominent position in this regard of the Iraqi-born Vefa’i order, one of the oldest, but least known, Sufi orders, whose wide-spread presence in Anatolia has been previously unrecognized. Historians have long been aware of a few prominent figures affiliated with this order around early Ottoman sultans; among them, for instance, the famous Sheikh Ede Bali, who predicted the grandeur of the Empire through his interpretation of a dream related to him by the empire’s eponymous founder, Osman. There are also individual cases of dervishes with a Vefa’i affiliation from among the Abdals of Rum, such as the well-known Geyikli Baba. Notwithstanding these few renowned cases, however, one finds little sign of the Vefa’iyye in the accounts of the early Ottoman Anatolian history. This is because there are no known narrative sources from before the late fifteenth century that allude to any Vefa’i presence in Anatolia, and the late fifteenth and sixteenth century sources that speak of Vefa’i connections of the above-mentioned figures do so only in passing. This paper argues that these individual cases are only the tip-of-the-iceberg representatives of a much more pervasive Vefa’i presence in Anatolia which cut across social, political and sectarian divisions. The scarcity of traces of the Vefa’iyye in the narrative sources despite this important place it occupied in Anatolian history has to do with the later conflation of the order’s legacy with that of the Bekta?i tradition as it was configured within a Yesevi framework in the Bekta?i hagiographic literature. On a broader level, this paper suggests that the recovery of the multifaceted trajectory of the Vefa’iyye will provide us with novel perspectives on the making of “heterodox” Islam in Anatolia in general, and the formation of the Bekta?iyye in particular.