Turkey once knocked six zeros off its money in a single day
By the early 2000s one old gold lira coin could fetch over 154 million paper lira, and Guinness named Turkey's currency the least valuable on earth. On 1 January 2005 the country swapped a million old lira for one new one, briefly handing that dubious title to Romania.
The name reaches back to the Roman libra, a pound weight of silver, which also gave rise to the French livre, the Italian lira and the pound sterling, whose weight abbreviation lb still echoes the Latin. Ottoman authorities made the lira their main unit of account in 1844, keeping the older kurus as a hundredth. The first Turkish lira replaced the Ottoman one in 1923, and from 1926 banknotes carried Ataturk's portrait. After his death Ismet Inonu briefly took his place, before Ataturk returned for good.
For years the currency was pegged: 2.8 lira to the dollar from 1946, devalued to 9 in 1960, then a series of hard and soft dollar pegs from 1970 as its value slid. Guinness put it at the bottom of the world's currencies for 1995 and 1996, then every year from 1999 through 2004. Parliament approved the redenomination on 28 January 2004. During a transition to December 2008 the replacement was officially the New Turkish lira, abbreviated YTL, with the Y standing for yeni, meaning new; the word was dropped in 2009.
The same year brought the E-9 banknotes, with a new 200 lira note and each denomination honouring a famous Turkish figure rather than landscapes or buildings. The currency sign followed in 2012. Designer Tulay Lale's entry beat 8,362 others: an L shaped like half an anchor, crossed by two strokes angled at 20 degrees. Critics claimed it resembled an upside-down Armenian dram sign. Unicode added it that September.
Since 2018 the lira has been in crisis, and most economists blamed pressure on the central bank to keep interest rates low. In 2021 it lost half its value, and official inflation hit 83 percent in 2022. A turn to conventional policy in 2023 lifted rates to 42.5 percent by year end, and inflation eased to 53.86 percent, though renewed depreciation began in early 2026.
Source: Turkish lira
