A couple of months ago I read a headline that said that Turkey was getting a new currency. Huh? I thought. How can that be? I sort of stored that information away in the back of my head, curious to see if it would actually happen while I was here. Well sure enough at the start of the new year the bank machine started spitting out new notes (It was fabulous for a while when all it would issue was 20 lira notes). In reality it hasn’t been as drastic of a change as it sounds. A few years before I arrived Turkey had taken steps to address the inflation problems they were having. They rescaled their currency moving from the Turkish lira to the New (yeni) Turkish lira (otherwise known as ytl) and chopping six zeros of the end. So 1,000,000 TL was worth 1 YTL. It was confusing enough when vendors in the market and some stores still priced goods using the old system. Now though, I guess that they’ve decided that the country will never go back to the old system. Or perhaps they just feel that it is no longer a new currency. So they’ve reissued all of the bills and coins and returned to calling it the Turkish lira. It seems to be a slow turnover…my wallet is a mix of ytl and tl. Although I am slightly amused be the fact that quite often in my change purse I can find the old tl, the ytl and the new tl. How many places do you know that have that many different versions of a currency circulating? I can also say that I’ve already been corrected several times by my students when I attempt to rephrase a question into something pertaining to them and use the ytl. Someone is always sure to speak up and say “Ms. C that no longer exists. You mean the tl, right?” So I’ll continue to slowly adjust to the new look and name, mourn the ending of bills with Kapadokya and Ephesus on them and enjoy that the new notes have a mathematician and a scientist. Above all I’ll just have to try to remember that it is now just the Turkish lira.