50 Manat

Turkmenistan's first manat series, introduced in November 1993, replaced the Soviet ruble at a rate of 500 rubles per 1 manat — an exchange designed to break cleanly from the collapsing ruble zone while the country's own monetary infrastructure was barely a year old. The Central State Bank had no established printing relationship at the time, and these early notes were produced by De La Rue in the United Kingdom.

The watermark — a repeating geometric pattern — is the sole machine-readable security feature on P#5, a thin line of defense for notes that entered circulation in a cash-dependent economy with limited counterfeiting detection capability at street level.