100 Lira Atatürk

This note holds a peculiar historical position: 1938 was the year Atatürk died, on November 10th, and the Central Bank was already mid-cycle with this series. Notes bearing his name and image continued to circulate unchanged for years afterward, the design effectively frozen at the moment of his death. Turkey did not rush to redesign its currency around a successor — there was no clean break, and the plates simply kept running.

De La Rue's involvement was long-standing; Turkey relied heavily on British security printers throughout the early Republican period, lacking domestic high-security printing capacity.