500 Lira Jalaladdin Rumi

Issued the year before the 700th anniversary of Rumi's death — he died in Konya in 1273 — this piece was part of Turkey's broader commemorative gold program of the late 1970s, a period when the country was experiencing severe political instability and near-weekly government changes. The timing was deliberate: secular Turkey invoking a 13th-century Sufi mystic as cultural patrimony, a move with its own complicated politics given ongoing tensions between the secular state and religious identity.