500 000 Lira Piri Reis

Piri Reis completed his famous world map — the Kitab-ı Bahriye — in 1513, drawing on sources that included, by his own account, a map used by Columbus. The 1995 coin commemorates the 500th anniversary of that claim, though scholars still debate whether the Antarctic coastline on the Piri Reis map represents genuine pre-Columbian knowledge or a later interpolation. The Ottoman admiral was executed in 1553, likely for refusing to continue a Persian Gulf campaign after the fall of Muscat.