1 Rouble The church of Sts Boris and Gleb

Boris and Gleb were the first saints canonized by the Kievan Rus church — princes murdered by their brother Sviatopolk in 1015 who chose death over fratricidal war. Their cult spread rapidly across the medieval Slavic world, and the church depicted on this coin is among the oldest surviving examples of Belarusian ecclesiastical architecture, the 12th-century structure in Grodno surviving wars and Soviet-era demolition campaigns that erased most of its contemporaries. This rouble belongs to Belarus's early commemorative program launched shortly after independence, when the National Bank issued a sustained series documenting national heritage sites before infrastructure funding to restore them had materialized.