500 Manat

Turkmenistan's first banknote series appeared almost immediately after independence from the Soviet Union, with the manat introduced in November 1993 to replace the Russian ruble. The Central State Bank — not yet restructured into the later Central Bank of Turkmenistan — issued this high denomination during a period of severe inflation that made large-value notes necessary almost from the start.

The watermark remains the sole security feature, a notably thin specification for a note of this face value, reflecting both the urgency of the issue and the limited facilities available to a newly sovereign state contracting foreign printing expertise under tight timelines.