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500 Leke
| Issuer | Banka e Shqipërisë |
|---|---|
| Year | 1994 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | New lek (1965-date) |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | At left, an intaglio portrait bust of Albanian poet and national figure Naim Frashëri (1846–1900) is set against ornate scrollwork vignettes along the left border. The large numeral 500 appears at centre-right within a guilloche underprint, with two facsimile signatures positioned above the denomination. The Albanian double-headed eagle emblem is placed at lower right, with the bank title and denomination text running along the upper and lower margins respectively. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | At left, a vignette of a mountainous landscape is rendered in blue intaglio, while at centre a lit candle rising from an ornate candlestick holder is encircled by a band of verse text in Albanian. The right portion carries a multicolour geometric folk-pattern underprint characteristic of Albanian decorative tradition, with the vertical numeral 500 and denomination text at centre-right and the year date 1994 at lower right. |
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| Comments |
Albania's mid-1990s notes were produced during the painful aftermath of the communist system's collapse — a period when the country's banking infrastructure was being rebuilt almost from scratch. The 1994 series, of which this is part, appeared just years before the catastrophic pyramid scheme crisis of 1997, when rioting and near-total state breakdown led to mass currency hoarding and destruction of banknote stocks.
A watermark alone as the primary security feature reflects both the era's printing economics and the limited counterfeiting threat deemed realistic at the time. The 1997 chaos rendered much of this series effectively unrecoverable from circulation.