The history of lettrism in Ottoman Rūm features so many fascinating characters that it becomes easy to ignore the "less interesting" ones. Perhaps the most famous of the latter is Ilyās b. ʿIsā Aḳḥiṣārī (d. 1559) of the Bayrami order. On the surface, Aḳḥiṣārī appears not to have been ignored by scholars, of course, to the contrary some of his works have been published, while the rest are generally well-known and have been studied. Ottomanists who do not necessarily work on the occult are also often aware of the Aḳḥiṣārī corpus and cite the scholarly studies about them, which is hardly the case for many other lettrists of the sixteenth century. And yet Sheikh Ilyās is rarely, if ever, considered alongside or in conjunction with developments in the wider Islamic world, specifically in the context of lettrism. This strange disconnect, between the generalist knowledge about his works and the specialist indifference about his person, is the starting point of the talk. One obvious reason for the disconnect is that Aḳḥiṣārī is too Rumi: his writings are entirely in Turkish, which no doubt contributed to the unusual (considering the subject matter) number of scholarly studies on them, mostly in Turkish academia. Sheikh Ilyās might also strike the historian of the Islamic occult as too provincial, as unlike his father, he seems to lack the obvious transregional connections that also render the scholarly study of fifteenth-century lettrists both exciting and important. This talk will be a preliminary assessment of Ilyās b. ʿIsā himself, his person and his milieu, in an effort to put the corpus he left behind in communication not only with his intellectual background, but also with the intellectual history of occult sciences. In doing so, particular attention will also be given to the Bayramiye’s sixteenth-century history, during which time the order (like many others in the Ottoman world in this period), was experiencing important transformations.