Giovanni Pacini's three-act opera Saffo, based on a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano after Pietro Beltrame's play, premiered in Naples, Italy on November 29, 1840. Six years later, in April 1846, it was staged in Sultan Abdulmecit's Istanbul, in the palace-sponsored public opera house, the Naum Theatre. In 1847, it was performed in Boston, Massachusetts at the Howard Athenaeum. Spectators in Istanbul, however, would be holding a different kind of libretto than their fellow spectators in Naples or Boston. The thirty-two page original Italian libretto was printed and published by Dalla Topografia Flautina in Naples a publishing house which specialized in music printing. As for the 1847 Boston libretto, it was published by the Boston-based company Oliver Ditson & Co. with select musical sections, the list of the singers, an argument section, a bilingual libretto and even ads. Compared to these libretti, he only existing Ottoman libretto of Saffo is rather different. It is a twelve-page, handwritten and bound summary (currently in the Turkish Presidency State Archives in Istanbul), made to be sold to the Turkish speaking spectators who were as new a phenomenon as the public operas in Istanbul. This Ottoman libretto has missing acts and a rather subjective selection of the plot line. Unlike the Naples and Boston libretti, it is not a word for word translation of a master copy, but a summary based on a rehearsal or performance. The lack of musical details indicate that the Ottoman libretto was not designed for the musically literate polyglots but those who needed to be acquainted with the plot. In this presentation, I will examine archival documents from the Turkish Presidency Archives in Istanbul, and discuss how the early Ottoman libretti called tercüme-i hülasa, emerged at the intersection of cosmopolitanism, print technologies, and westernization efforts in the Empire. In the first part of the presentation, I will look into the calligraphic and lithographic traditions and technologies in Abdülmecit I's Istanbul (1839-61) and music printing in the Ottoman Empire. In the second part, I will be discussing how the content of hülasa differ from both western libretti of the 1840s and the Hamidian era libretti, with a focus on content appropriations such as religious terms, portrayal of ancient Greece, and the censorship of opera texts in late Ottoman Empire.