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500 Livres
| Issuer | Imperial Ottoman Bank (Banque Impériale Ottomane) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1918 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Lira (1844-1923) |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | The reverse is printed in a muted rose-mauve tone with a dense guilloche and floral arabesque border repeating on all four sides. The denomination 500 appears in Western numerals at lower centre and in Arabic-Eastern numerals at the upper corners. A large central text block in Ottoman Turkish cursive script sets out the note's legal and payment provisions across several lines, with the serial number C-004905 at top centre flanked by two manuscript signatures; additional handwritten endorsements appear across the face of the text. |
| Reverse lettering | ٥٠٠ |
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| Comments |
The Imperial Ottoman Bank was a Franco-British joint-stock institution, not a Turkish state bank — it held the exclusive right to issue banknotes in Ottoman territory under concessions renewed periodically from 1863 onward. By 1918 the geopolitical situation had made printing in Paris or London unthinkable, so the contract went to the Reichsdruckerei in Berlin, the same facility producing currency for the German imperial government itself. That wartime alliance explains the otherwise incongruous sight of an Ottoman institution's paper being struck in the enemy capital of its founding shareholders.
The 1918 series, of which this 500 Livres is the highest denomination, circulated during the final collapse of Ottoman financial stability. Reichsdruckerei production is generally clean and technically precise, but postwar redemption was chaotic enough that survival of high-value notes in any consistent condition is uneven.