The Turkish lira

Where the lira and the kuruş come from

Lira descends from the Roman libra, a unit of weight, like the Italian lira and the pound. The Ottoman Empire made the lira its main unit of account in 1844 and kept the older kuruş as its hundredth, and the Ottoman lira stayed in circulation until the end of 1927.

The Republic's first notes went into circulation on 5 December 1927. The English firm Thomas De La Rue printed them, their main text in Ottoman script and their denominations in French, because they were made before the alphabet reform of 1 November 1928. Ottoman paper money stopped being legal tender on 4 September 1928. The abbreviation TL, which the lira still uses, reverses LT, the sign of the Ottoman lira, which stood for livre turque.

Who issues it and under which law

The central bank was set up by Law 1715, enacted on 11 June 1930, as a joint stock company to show that it was not a public body. Early notes were printed abroad, in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, until the bank's Banknote Printing Plant started work in the 1950s; all the notes of the 2005 issue were printed in Türkiye. Amendments of 25 April 2001 made price stability the bank's primary objective. A free floating exchange rate had been adopted two months earlier, on 22 February 2001.

How the lira lost its zeros

The seventh emission group, first issued in 1979, grew to 15 denominations, the last of them a 20,000,000 lira note. Law 5083 of 28 January 2004 authorised the redenomination. From 1 January 2005 the New Turkish lira, written YTL, replaced the old lira at one to a million, and the ISO code went from TRL to TRY. The Y comes from yeni, Turkish for new.

Law 5083 also let the Council of Ministers drop the prefix. A Council of Ministers decision published on 5 May 2007 removed it from 1 January 2009, the day the ninth emission group arrived with a new 200 lira note. The 2005 notes were withdrawn on 1 January 2010.

Why the sign drew objections

The central bank ran a competition for a sign and chose a design by Tülay Lale from a shortlist of seven, out of 8,362 entries. It was unveiled on 1 March 2012. The bank describes it as anchor-like, for a currency it calls a safe haven, with upward parallel lines for a value it says is steadily rising. Unicode encoded it that year.

Objections followed. A vice chairman of the opposition CHP said it resembled the initials of the then prime minister, in the manner of an Ottoman sultan's tughra. Others pointed to a likeness with the Armenian dram sign turned upside down.