500 Lek

The Banka e Shtetit Shqiptar — the Albanian State Bank — was established in 1945 as part of the postwar communist restructuring that displaced the earlier National Bank of Albania, which had operated under Italian influence since the 1920s. The 1953 series marked a consolidation of the new regime's monetary authority, issued after Albania had broken with Yugoslavia in 1948 and was operating under close Soviet alignment. The 500 Lek denomination sat at the top of the series — a high face value in a currency that had already been decimated by wartime inflation and the 1945 monetary reform that wiped out much of the old lek circulation.