5 Lek

The 1953 Albanian banknote series was issued under the Banka e Shtetit Shqiptar — the State Bank of Albania — during the height of Enver Hoxha's consolidation of power and the country's tight alignment with the Soviet economic model. The entire series replaced the 1947 issue, itself a post-liberation reform that had swept away the wartime and Italian occupation currencies.

Albania's monetary system in this period was almost entirely insulated from Western clearing mechanisms, making surviving examples that left the country before the 1965 currency reform genuinely uncommon in Western collections. The 1965 reform exchanged old notes at 10:1, rendering the 1953 series obsolete overnight.