20 Lira Matrakçı Nasuh

Matrakçı Nasuh was a 16th-century Ottoman polymath — soldier, mathematician, historian, and the inventor of a martial sport called matrak — but he is best remembered today for his illustrated chronicle of Suleiman the Magnificent's 1534–1536 Iraqi campaign, the Beyan-ı Menazil, which contains some of the earliest topographical city views produced anywhere in the Islamic world. His depictions of Baghdad, Tabriz, and dozens of other cities are treated by historians as genuine cartographic documents rather than decorative illustration.

The Turkish Mint's "Famous Turks" silver series, under which this coin was issued, has run intermittently since the 1990s and draws heavily on figures whose reputations have been rehabilitated or elevated by modern Turkish cultural nationalism.