2 1/2 Lira

Turkey's pre-war relationship with Thomas De La Rue produced several low-denomination notes that were effectively stopgap issues, and this 2½ Lira is among the more awkward of them — fractional denominations in paper were never popular with the Turkish public, who preferred coin for small transactions. The 1939 date places it squarely in the period when the Merkez Bankası was still heavily dependent on foreign printers, having not yet developed domestic security printing capacity.

The 2½ Lira denomination was discontinued relatively quickly and not carried forward into the postwar series, making surviving circulated examples harder to find than the face value suggests.