For some members, Alevism is simply a cultural identity, rather than a form of worship.

Practicing Alevis, however, read from the same Islamic texts as mainstream Muslims, but worship in a cemevi, or prayer hall, rather than a mosque. Men and women pray alongside one another, and — unlike observant Sunnis — are not expected to pray five times a day.

By some metrics, the Alevis are safer now than at many points in their history. For centuries they have been the victims of pogroms, both during Ottoman times and under the secular Turkish republic. Hundreds of Alevis were murdered in sectarian violence in the tumultuous years that preceded Turkey’s 1980 coup, and dozens were killed during the 1990s.

Under Mr. Erdogan, however, there has been no mass sectarian violence against Alevis. In fact, Alevis were among the minorities whose rights Mr. Erdogan initially promised to strengthen. In 2007, for instance, he began what was termed an “Alevi opening,” a yearlong effort to discuss the improvement of Alevi rights.

Some even viewed the “opening” as part of a broader attempt to challenge the monocultural and monoethnic national identity promoted by the country’s founders, who saw the ideal citizen as Turkish and not Kurdish and, despite their secular leanings, Sunni not Alevi.

“We are all citizens of the Turkish republic,” Mr. Erdogan said to a group of Alevis in January 2008. “We are all hosts of this country, siblings without discrimination between you and us.”

Nearly a decade later, sitting in the hills outside Osmancik, Mr. Gormez and his Alevi friends complained about the Sunni takeover of Osmancik’s cemevi. But they also conceded that in terms of pure security the overall situation has improved in the years since the pogroms of the 1970s, when Alevi villagers built barricades outside their homes to defend themselves.

“Now,” said Servet Unal, a retired civil servant sitting beside Mr. Gormez, “we are comfortable.”

But beyond the matter of their physical safety, the plight of Alevis in Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey is more complex, as the participants at a recent Alevi rally in the city of Sivas showed.