20 Kuruş

The 1854 Ottoman kaime notes emerged from fiscal desperation. The Crimean War had begun, and the Imperial Treasury lacked the hard currency to fund both military operations and routine government expenditure. These paper obligations — kaime — were not issued by a central bank, because no such institution yet existed in Ottoman financial infrastructure. The Imperial Treasury issued them directly, which is precisely why confidence in them was chronically fragile.

Counterfeiting was a persistent and well-documented problem with the kaime series, serious enough that the government attempted multiple reissue and recall cycles throughout the 1850s. An official seal was the primary — and by modern standards, woefully inadequate — security measure.