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500 000 Lira

Issuer Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası (Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey)
Year 1997
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Value 500 000 Lira (500 000 TRL)
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Protection type Watermark
Protection description Watermark portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
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By 1997, Turkish inflation had been running above 70% annually for most of the decade, and the 500,000 Lira note was itself a symptom — a denomination that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s, when the largest note in circulation was 1,000 Lira. The Central Bank's own printing facility in Ankara had been producing successively larger denominations throughout the 1990s at a pace that kept the presses continuously occupied.

This series carried only a basic watermark as its primary security feature — a reflection of how quickly inflation outpaced the economics of investing in sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures for notes whose real value eroded within months of printing. The 500,000 Lira denomination was eventually made obsolete by the 2005 redenomination, which struck six zeros from the currency and introduced the New Turkish Lira.