2½ Livres Turques

The Dette Publique Ottomane — the Ottoman Public Debt Administration — was not a state bank but a foreign creditor body established after the 1881 Muharrem Decree, when the empire ceded direct control over certain tax revenues to European bondholders. By 1914 it had accumulated enough administrative infrastructure to begin issuing emergency paper money, something no bondholder organization had done before or has done since.

The fractional 2½ Livre denomination reflects the acute small-change shortage that gripped the empire during the First World War, when metallic coinage had almost entirely vanished from circulation.