5 Qirush / Piastres

By 1952, the Banque de Syrie et du Liban was operating on borrowed time as a monetary authority. Syria had already begun severing its currency ties with Lebanon following independence, and this aluminium issue appeared just as the two countries were finalizing the dissolution of their shared monetary union — a process completed when Syria established its own central bank the following year. The shift to aluminium itself signals the period's economic fragility; earlier issues in this series had used silver.