200 Lira Jalaladdin Rumi

Issued the year before the 900th anniversary of Rumi's birth, this coin preceded a broader wave of commemorative output from Ankara tied to the 1979 centennial observances. Turkey's relationship with Rumi is politically layered — the Mevlevi Order he founded was formally banned under Atatürk's 1925 suppression of religious brotherhoods, reducing the Konya shrine to a state museum. Official commemoration on currency represented a careful rehabilitation, cultural rather than theological.