1 Rouble Yanka Kupala National Academic Theater. 100 Years

Yanka Kupala — the pen name of Ivan Dominikovich Lutsevich — is among the most politically loaded cultural figures in Belarusian history. The theater named after him was established in Minsk in 1920, making 2020 its centenary. Kupala himself died in 1942 under circumstances that remain disputed: the official Soviet account ruled his fall from a Moscow hotel staircase an accident, though many Belarusian scholars have long suspected otherwise.

The commemorative rouble series from the National Bank of Belarus has used the Kupala theater as a subject at a moment of particular irony — 2020 was also the year the theater's own director and much of its ensemble resigned en masse in protest of post-election political repression.