10 Lekë

The 1957 Albanian state bank series, of which this 10 Lekë is part, was issued under a monetary system that had already undergone one brutal redenomination in 1947 — a deliberate instrument of Hoxha's regime to wipe out accumulated private savings and tighten state control over the economy. The 1957 notes represented a stabilization of sorts, a managed currency in a country almost entirely severed from Western financial systems by that point.

Albanian notes of this period are frequently found with handling wear concentrated along the vertical center fold — a known characteristic of how they were stored in state wage packets.