1 Ghirsh / Piastre WW2 War Coinage, Pattern

Syria in 1940 was under French Mandate administration, and the outbreak of war severely disrupted metal supplies and minting logistics. This piece is a pattern — a trial strike never approved for circulation — produced as France scrambled to adapt its colonial coinage programs to wartime material constraints. Aluminium bronze was being tested across multiple Mandate territories as a substitute for the nickel and copper alloys that war production had claimed.

No regular-issue 1940 ghirsh in this composition entered circulation. The pattern status makes surviving examples essentially administrative artifacts of a colonial monetary system that would collapse entirely with the fall of France later that same year.