The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a growing awareness of alchemy, and the canonical sources of this branch of knowledge, among the learned elite of the Ottoman Empire’s Turkophone central lands. Rumi scholars from Anatolia, the Balkans, and Istanbul wrote numerous books and treatises on the subject—almost all in Arabic—in this period and came under the marked influence of ‘Izz al-din Aydemir al-Jildaki (d. after 1343), an Egyptian sage who had previously been a little-known figure in the lands of Rum. The next hundred years that followed was characterized by an ever intensifying vernacularization effort: a substantial number of major works of the classical period by alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan and Ibn Wahshiyya were translated into Turkish, along with some of the Arabic works authored by Ottoman scholars themselves. Dozens of new works, both in verse and prose, were composed in Turkish, also in the seventeenth century. It is clear that alchemy eventually reached an audience beyond the trilingual learned elite of the empire, but does this constitute a popularization of alchemical knowledge? The aforementioned Turkish works do not allow us to provide a satisfactory answer to this question, precisely because their authors (but not the entirety of their readership) considered themselves to belong to an exclusive network of seekers and philosophers who inquired into the secrets of divine knowledge. The present talk will offer some thoughts on the issue of popularization through an unassuming source: the “notebook” of an anonymous alchemist from 1630s Istanbul. The notebook in question brings together a wide range of material about alchemy, from partial translations of Arabic treatises to popular alchemical poems in the Turkish vernacular, as well as hundreds of recipes, magical formulae, a bibliography of the corpus of al-Jildaki, and some very candid remarks by the owner of the notebook. Taken together, these individual elements provide an unparalleled glimpse into the intellectual horizons, and doubts, of a struggling alchemist in seventeenth-century Istanbul.