Turkish Money: a matter of 0’s

Prices in Turkey are (usually) quoted in YTL, or Yeni Türk Lirasi. Yeni means new. 1 YTL = $0.64 (roughly). Or 3 are about 2 dollars.

(the i in lirasi shouldn’t have a dot, but I haven’t figured out how to control those things on my Mac)

Why new? Because Turkey went through some mindboggling inflation in the previous decade, reaching 100% at one point.

A dollar bought 13,000 lira in 1993.

I traded a dollar for maybe 20,000 lira in 94.

1995 – 40,000

1996 – 100,000

1999 – 500,000

2001 – 1,000,000

Click to continue –>The currency stabilized around 1.3 – 1.4M to the dollar (but not before making finances for ordinary people incredibly difficult).

Anyway, in 2005 the old Turkish Lira were replaced by new Turkish Lira. They did a good job of getting the old bills and coins out of circulation (as far as I could tell). Conversion was a snap – 1,000,000 TRL = 1 YTL. In fact, one piece of advise was to say, for example, instead of 47 million lira, 47 new lira. Just replace “million” with “new” and your all set…

The cents were not so smooth. Obviously, when a pack of cigarettes costs a million four hundred thousand, people don’t worry so much about cents. But now?

An old Turkish (ottoman?) subunit of money was the “kurush” (Kurus, with a mark under the s). Yeni kurus were introduced as one one hundredth of a yeni lira (I saw coins of 5, 10, 25, and 50 new kurus).

(This has shades of Israel introducing shekels a few decades ago. There was more than a little laughter when they pulled the name of their new currency from the old testament).

In Turkish, the words for 20 and 2 are not related, nor are 30 and 3, or 40 and 4, or 50 and 5. It is not as easy to switch from saying four hundred thousand lira to forty new kurush. And so people didn’t.

So the poor tourist?

3 yeni lira, 400,000… means? okay, 3.40. But the coins really say 25, 10 and 5. And you have to know they add up to 400,000.

And, “How much is that?”  “five hundred” (think, right, that means 50 cents).

Links:
http://www.turkisheconomy.org.uk/ytl.html
http://www.antalya.de/aagb/currency.htm