1 Rouble Napoleon Orda

Napoleon Orda spent decades in Parisian exile after participating in the 1830 Polish uprising against Russian rule — the very empire whose rouble denomination now commemorates him. He studied under Chopin and became a prolific landscape artist, but his lasting documentary value lies in the roughly 1000 drawings he made of historical sites across Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland between the 1850s and 1880s, many of which record buildings demolished or destroyed in the following century.

Belarus has issued extensively in this commemorative series honoring figures of shared Polish-Belarusian cultural heritage, a pointed exercise in reclaiming identities suppressed under Soviet rule.