25 Livres

The Ottoman Public Debt Administration was not a bank — it was an international creditor body established in 1881 to manage revenues pledged against the Ottoman Empire's defaulted foreign loans. By 1917, with the empire at war alongside Germany and the Allies controlling Mediterranean supply lines, the Düyun-u Umumiye turned to the Reichsdruckerei in Berlin to produce paper currency it would never have issued under peacetime conditions. The arrangement was as much political as logistical.

Reichsdruckerei production for an Ottoman creditor organ in the middle of a German-Ottoman military alliance is a detail that sharpens the note's historical position considerably. It did not survive long as a functioning instrument — the 1918 armistice and the subsequent dissolution of the Düyun-u Umumiye itself in 1923 rendered the entire series obsolete.