15 000 000 Lira Zeugma

The Zeugma mosaic rescue is one of the more dramatic episodes in modern Turkish archaeology. When the Birecik Dam on the Euphrates began filling in 2000, it submerged roughly a third of the ancient Greco-Roman city of Zeugma — including sections that had never been excavated. An emergency campaign in the final months before inundation recovered dozens of intact mosaic floors, pulling them from the rising water in pieces and reassembling them in Gaziantep. The operation drew international funding and some of the fastest large-scale archaeological work ever conducted in the region.

This coin was issued three years after the flood, when the rescued mosaics had become a point of considerable national and cultural attention.