100 Lira Ionians

The "Ionians" designation places this coin within Turkey's long-running regional civilizations bullion series, which the Central Bank launched to highlight Anatolia's pre-Ottoman and pre-Roman histories. Ionia — the western Anatolian coastal region colonized by Greek settlers around the 10th century BC — is credited by Herodotus as the birthplace of coinage itself, with electrum issues from Lydia and the Ionian cities among the earliest struck money known.

The irony of a modern Turkish gold coin commemorating Ionian Greeks is not incidental — it reflects a deliberate reframing of Anatolian identity that has shaped Turkish state cultural policy since the early Republican period.