Within hours of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announcing a new scheme that promised to guard savers from volatility in the value of the Turkish lira, the state-owned Halkbank began urging its customers to put their faith in the national currency.
In a slickly produced advert, set to rousing Ottoman-inspired music, a well-known television actor walks a young friend through a museum exhibition and tells him that, just as the Turkish flag, the Turkish language and the parliament represent the country’s pride, “the Turkish lira is our power”.
Erdogan hopes that the message — combined with an attractive new investment proposition — will persuade millions of Turks to turn their backs on dollars and gold and put their savings in lira. The currency, which had lost 50 per cent against the dollar before his announcement, enjoyed its strongest day’s trading in decades in the wake of the news, albeit one that came with the help of a multibillion intervention by the country’s central bank.