1 Rouble Polotsk

Issued as part of Belarus's "Cities of Belarus" commemorative series, this rouble marks Polotsk's claim as the oldest recorded city in the country, first mentioned in the Rus' Primary Chronicle under the year 862. The National Bank launched the series in the late 1990s partly as an exercise in post-Soviet national identity construction — Polotsk's medieval Principality had been independent enough from both Moscow and Kiev to make it a politically convenient symbol.

Polotsk was also home to Euphrosyne, a 12th-century abbess later canonized, and to the polymath Francysk Skaryna, who produced the first printed books in the Cyrillic-script Ruthenian language in 1517.