50 Livres

The Imperial Ottoman Bank — nominally a Franco-British joint venture headquartered in Constantinople — continued issuing currency well into the First World War despite the Ottoman Empire being at war with both France and Britain. The 1916 series, of which this 50 Livres is part, was issued under wartime financial pressure, with the bank increasingly subordinated to the needs of the Committee of Union and Progress government.

Wartime inflation hit Ottoman paper hard. By 1918 the lira had lost the majority of its pre-war value, and much of this series was redeemed or destroyed following the Armistice. High-denomination survivor notes from 1916 are correspondingly scarcer than their lower-value counterparts from the same run.