20 Lira İsmet İnönü

İsmet İnönü served as Turkey's second president from 1938 to 1950, and again as Prime Minister into the 1970s — a political career spanning half a century that included steering the country through World War II as a declared neutral, a diplomatic tightrope that preserved Turkish sovereignty while Ankara was being courted simultaneously by Berlin and London. The Darphane has issued a number of single-subject commemoratives in this format honoring figures of the early Republic, and İnönü, as the last surviving architect of the 1923 founding generation, occupies a distinct place in that series.