1 500 000 Lira Myra'li Aziz Noel Baba and Euro

Issued the year Turkey was formally confirmed as a candidate for EU accession negotiations, this coin pairs the ancient Lycian city of Myra — where the historical Nicholas of Myra served as bishop in the 4th century — with an explicit euro symbol, a gesture of westward orientation that aged awkwardly given Turkey's still-unresolved accession status nearly three decades later. Nicholas's connection to Myra is the actual biographical root of the Santa Claus tradition, a fact often buried under centuries of Dutch and American commercial reinvention.