Off the Hearth, Into the Square: The Anatomy of a Janissary Rebellion

In the summer of 1444, the Ottoman mint quietly cut the silver content of one akçe by roughly 11.5%. [1] The sultan who ordered the devaluation, Mehmed II, was just twelve years old, newly placed on the throne by his father, Murad II. The Janissaries, whose salaries were paid directly in akçe, noticed the pay cut immediately.

On a hill outside Edirne, later named Buçuktepe for the half-akçe raise that ended the affair, they protested. [1] The Buçuktepe Incident of 1446 is remembered as the first Janissary revolt on record. Beneath layers of internal politics and broader grievances, the dispute was fundamentally driven by the falling purchasing power of their wages.

Buçuktepe was the catalyst for a pattern in Ottoman history that was to repeat itself across nearly four centuries, a ritual the Janissaries returned to again and again whenever they judged that the state had broken faith with them.

Over time, it developed into a ritual with clear stages:

1. Boycott: First, they refused to eat the food provided by the sultan. [2]
2. Revolt: If that didn’t move the palace, the next step was open rebellion. Each company (orta) lifted its cooking cauldron (kazan) off the hearth and carried it out to the square.

That act, the cauldron taken from the barracks and placed in the square, gave the pattern its enduring name: kazan kaldırmak, or “raising the cauldron.” It became the closest thing the Janissaries had to a formal declaration of no confidence.

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Kazan kaldırmak, or “raising the cauldron” became the closest thing the Janissaries had to a formal declaration of no confidence.

The Noble Cauldron

The cauldron carried that kind of weight because, to the Corps, it was never just cookware.

The Janissaries had been established roughly a century before Buçuktepe, under Murad I. From their beginnings, they moved in close company with the Ahi brotherhoods and wandering abdals, who instilled in them a code of conduct (fütüvvet) shared with guild brotherhoods across the Islamic world. [3] At the head of that spiritual lineage stood Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî, a Sufi mystic who had come to Anatolia from Khorasan in the thirteenth century and eventually became known as the founder of the Bektaşi order. [4]

Legend holds that he named the Corps Yeniçeri, shaped their caps (börk) from his own sleeve, and cooked for them from the Kazan-ı Şerif, or the Noble Cauldron. [3,5] Everything about the Corps took its shape from the kitchen afterward: commanding officers were titled “soup-makers” (çorbacı), and units were organized, in name and structure, around the hearth (ocak). [5]

Although the timeline doesn’t add up, Hacı Bektaş died a century before the Corps existed to be blessed by him, the legend lived on. It was through this living myth that the Janissaries understood their world, with Hacı Bektaş recorded in their own writings as the spiritual founder (Pîr) of the Janissary hearth itself. [3]

The Janissaries’ cauldron was not unique in claiming this kind of weight. Sacred communal cauldrons were kept at Sufi lodges across the Ottoman world, and some are still regarded as sacred objects today, especially regarding the Bektaşi tradition of charity and the “Due of the Cauldron” (Kara Kazan Hakkı). [6]

The Janissaries, called in their tradition the “sons of Hacı Bektaş,” kept their own Noble Cauldron, a symbol of abundance and prosperity, in a dedicated room under permanent guard. [6] When it came time to revolt, lifting those cauldrons onto their shoulders and carrying them into the square was an appeal past the sultan himself to whatever the Corps believed had made them legitimate in the first place.

The Legacy of the Janissaries

After centuries of revolts, deposed sultans, and the Corps’ hardening into an entrenched political interest, the Janissaries were finally dissolved in 1826. Their last uprising ended with the Corps’ total destruction, an outcome the state named the “Auspicious Incident” (Vaka-i Hayriye).

The physical practice ended there, but the phrase did not. Its legacy is a linguistic one: the echoes of Buçuktepe still resonate in the phrase today. Contemporary lexicons preserve both meanings side by side [7]: the historical sense of Janissaries raising the cauldron to revolt, and a figurative one that has long since detached from soup and soldiers both, meaning simply to rise up, together, against whoever is in charge.

Contemporary Turkish speakers still reach for kazan kaldırmak to describe collective defiance: unpaid workers raise the cauldron outside a factory gate, students do it against a university administration, or even a football team unhappy with its coach is described, half-jokingly, as having raised the cauldron. The shape underneath hasn’t changed for six centuries: people who are fed from the same source, refusing together, out loud, to stay quiet about what they’re owed.

REFERENCES

1. İnce, Y. (2018). Sultanın İsyankâr Kullarının İlk İsyanı: Buçuktepe Vakası (1446) [The First Rebellion By The Rebellious Subjects of The Sultan: The Case of Buçuktepe (1446)]. History Studies, 10(5), 83-101 (cited p. 88) https://doi.org/10.9737/hist.2018.622
2. Selânikî, M. E. (1999). Tarih-i Selânikî (971–1003 AH / 1563–1595 CE) (M. İpşirli, Ed.; Vol. 1, 2nd ed.). Türk Tarih Kurumu. (cited pp. 230-231) (Original 1st ed. published 1989)
3. Maden, F. (2015). Yeniçerilik-Bektaşilik ilişkileri ve Yeniçeri isyanlarında Bektaşiler. Türk Kültürü ve Hacı Bektaş Velî Araştırma Dergisi, (73), 173-202 (cited pp. 174, 175, 181-182) https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/tkhcbva/article/1157245
4. Hacı Bektaş Veli Research and Application Institute. (2026, July 10). The life of Haci Bektas Veli and his works. Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University. https://hbvenstitu.nevsehir.edu.tr/en/the-life-of-haci-bektas-veli-and-his-works
5. Koçu, R. E. (1966) İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, Cilt 8 (Çiroz – Dişbuğdaycılar Sokağı). İstanbul: Koçu Yayınları (cited p. 4098) https://istanbulansiklopedisi.org/handle/rek/13030
6. Çelepi, M. S. (2019). Gelenek, Görenek ve İnançlar T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı. (cited pp. 99, 100) https://www.kulturportali.gov.tr/mrepo/eKitap/eb-GelenekGorenekInanclar/
7. Türk Dil Kurumu. (n.d.). Kazan kaldırmak (veya devirmek). In Güncel Türkçe Sözlük. Retrieved August 1, 2026, from https://sozluk.gov.tr/