When Albania became independent in 1912, it did not have a national currency. For the next fourteen years, Albanian shops and markets ran on whatever coins people happened to carry — Ottoman piastres, Italian lire, Greek drachmas, Austro-Hungarian crowns. The country minted no money of its own.
That changed on February 16, 1926, when the Albanian government introduced a new monetary unit and named it after the most famous conqueror in ancient history: Alexander the Great — Leka i Madh in Albanian, shortened to lek.
A century later, the lek is still Albania’s currency. Its coins carry Illyrian queens and ancient warships. Its banknotes carry the national hero, the independence leader, and the poets of the Albanian Renaissance. What a country puts on its money is a compressed self-portrait, and Albania’s tells a particular story.
The name: why Alexander the Great
The word lek is the Albanian short form of Leka, which is the Albanian rendering of Alexander. The full honorific is Leka i Madh — Alexander the Great.
The choice was deliberate. When Albanian legislators debated the name of the new currency in 1925 and 1926, they picked a figure who carried ancient prestige and a claim to the land itself. Albanian national tradition holds that Alexander’s mother, Olympias, came from Epirus — the ancient kingdom that overlapped with modern southern Albania and northwestern Greece — and that the Macedonian court had Illyrian connections through marriage and alliance. Whether Alexander himself was “Albanian” is a modern question projected onto an ancient world that did not use the category, but the choice of his name for the currency was a statement about where Albanians placed themselves in Mediterranean history.
The franga, a gold-based unit worth five lek, circulated alongside the lek in the early years. Gold franga coins bearing King Ahmet Zogu’s portrait were struck in the late 1920s and 1930s. The franga disappeared after World War II; the lek survived.
Before the lek: fourteen years without a national currency
Albania declared independence on November 28, 1912, but the new state spent its first decade and a half in monetary improvisation. No Albanian mint existed. No central bank existed. The population used whatever currencies the surrounding economies pushed across the border.
In the north, the Austro-Hungarian crown and then the Albanian franc (a wartime provisional unit) circulated. In the south, the Greek drachma had a presence. Italian lire were common along the coast, where Italian commercial interests were strongest. Ottoman piastres — the currency of the empire Albania had just left — remained in daily use long after independence, particularly in rural areas where Ottoman-era coins were the only metal money people had ever handled.
The effect was practical chaos. A shopkeeper in Shkodër and a shopkeeper in Gjirokastër were not using the same money. Tax collection was difficult when the government had to accept multiple currencies at fluctuating exchange rates. The lack of a national currency was not a symbolic gap — it was an administrative one.
1926: the Bank of Albania and a new currency
The Bank of Albania was established on September 2, 1925, with its charter approved by the Albanian parliament and backed by Italian capital. The bank was headquartered in Durrës and later moved to Tirana. Its first governor was the Italian financier Mario Alberti — a reflection of Italy’s dominant economic role in interwar Albania.
The lek entered circulation on February 16, 1926. The initial system had two tiers: the lek for everyday transactions and the franga ari (gold franc) for larger sums and international trade, pegged at 1 franga = 5 lek. The gold franc was tied to the gold standard through its Italian financial backing.
Early banknotes were printed abroad — first by the Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato in Rome, later by other European printing houses. Albania did not have the industrial capacity to print its own currency until decades later. The denominations of the first series — 1, 5, 20, and 100 franga — reflected a small, largely agricultural economy where most transactions were in coins.
When Ahmet Zogu declared himself King Zog I in 1928, the currency adapted. Gold coins bearing Zog’s portrait and the double-headed eagle were struck for the franga denominations. These coins are now collector’s items — fewer than a few thousand survive in good condition, and they trade at significant premiums over their gold content.
The 1965 redenomination and the “old lek” that never died
After World War II, the communist government of Enver Hoxha nationalized the Bank of Albania and cut all ties with Italian capital. The lek became the sole currency of one of Europe’s most isolated states.
By the early 1960s, inflation from the postwar reconstruction and the break with the Soviet Union in 1961 had eroded the lek’s value. In 1965, the government redenominated: 10 old lek became 1 new lek. Prices, wages, and bank balances were all divided by ten overnight.
The reform achieved its monetary goal. But it failed to change how Albanians talked about money.
Six decades later, many Albanians — particularly in markets, taxis, and smaller shops — still quote prices in “old lek.” A coffee that costs 200 lek might be called “dy mijë” (two thousand) by the server. A rent of 30,000 lek per month might be quoted as 300,000. The practice is not universal (banks, supermarkets, and ATMs use the official new lek), and it is more common among older Albanians than younger ones, but it persists widely enough that every visitor and returning diaspora member learns to ask: Lek i ri apo i vjetër? — new lek or old?
The reason it persists is partly generational memory and partly the fact that old lek often makes prices feel more substantial. “Dy mijë” for a coffee sounds like a real transaction. “Dyqind” (two hundred) sounds like pocket change. The redenomination changed the math but not the instinct.
Who is on the money
What a country puts on its currency is a curated gallery of who it wants to remember. Albania’s choices, across six banknotes and five regular-issue coins, span roughly 2,300 years.
Coins
Albania currently circulates coins in five denominations:
- 5 lek — the double-headed eagle, the national emblem inherited from Skanderbeg’s banner
- 10 lek — Berat Castle, the UNESCO-listed Ottoman-era fortress in central Albania
- 20 lek — a Liburnian ship, the fast warship used by the Illyrian kingdoms to control the Adriatic
- 50 lek — Gentius, the last king of Illyria, who ruled from Scodra (modern Shkodër) until his defeat by Rome in 168 BC (for the dynasty he inherited and lost, see Rulers of Illyria)
- 100 lek — Teuta, the Illyrian queen-regent whose conflict with Rome in the 230s BC brought the first Roman legions across the Adriatic (her reign and its consequences are covered in Rulers of Illyria)
The coin designs emphasize pre-Ottoman Albania: Illyrian rulers, Illyrian naval technology, a medieval fortress, and the national symbol. The oldest figure on any Albanian coin — Gentius — dates to the 2nd century BC.
Banknotes
The current banknote series, issued between 2019 and 2022 by the Bank of Albania, replaced a previous series that had been in circulation since the late 1990s. The 200-lek note was Albania’s first polymer banknote.
- 200 lek — Naim Frashëri (1846–1900), the poet who wrote Bagëti e Bujqësia and Istori e Skënderbeut, foundational texts of the Albanian literary Renaissance
- 500 lek — Ismail Qemali (1844–1919), who read the declaration of Albanian independence at Vlorë on November 28, 1912
- 1,000 lek — Pjeter Bogdani (c. 1630–1689), the theologian and writer whose Cuneus Prophetarum (1685) is one of the oldest prose works in Albanian
- 2,000 lek — Gentius, the last Illyrian king — the same figure who appears on the 50-lek coin, here on a larger denomination that marks his place in the Illyrian state-building tradition (his dynasty’s full history is in Rulers of Illyria)
- 5,000 lek — Skanderbeg (c. 1405–1468), Albania’s national hero, who held off the Ottoman Empire for 25 years from the fortress of Krujë
- 10,000 lek — Asdreni (Aleks Stavre Drenova, 1872–1947), the poet who wrote the lyrics of Hymni i Flamurit, the Albanian national anthem
The sequence from 200 to 10,000 lek reads, roughly, as: Renaissance poet → independence leader → early modern writer → Illyrian king → medieval hero → anthem poet. It covers six centuries of documented Albanian-language civilization and another two millennia of the Illyrian past.
The lek today
The Albanian lek (currency code ALL) is a managed float — the Bank of Albania does not peg it to any foreign currency but intervenes in exchange markets to limit sharp swings. As of mid-2026, the lek trades at roughly 95–105 per U.S. dollar and 90–100 per euro, though the rate fluctuates.
For the Albanian diaspora in the United States, the lek is the currency of family visits, property transactions, and remittances. Western Union and MoneyGram transfers to Albania are denominated in dollars or euros and converted to lek at the receiving end. Bank transfers between US and Albanian accounts go through SWIFT at the spot rate. The Bank of Albania publishes the official exchange rate daily.
Albania has no near-term plans to adopt the euro, despite its status as an EU candidate country since 2014. Euro adoption would require meeting the Maastricht convergence criteria — inflation, deficit, and debt targets — and joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism II for at least two years. The lek is likely to remain Albania’s currency well into the 2030s.
The coins will keep carrying Gentius and Teuta. The banknotes will keep carrying Skanderbeg and Ismail Qemali. And at the market in Tirana, someone will still quote you a price in old lek — ten times the real number, sixty years after the redenomination, because some habits outlast the currency reforms that created them.