1 Lek

Albania's aluminium coinage of the late communist period was produced under Enver Hoxha's isolationist regime, which had severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1961 and China by 1978, leaving the country economically strangled and entirely self-reliant for basic monetary production. By 1988, Hoxha was dead and Ramiz Alia had inherited a state on the edge of collapse — the currency these coins represented would become functionally worthless within a few years as the regime disintegrated in 1990–91.