10 000 Dram Priest Komitas Vardapet

Komitas Vardapet — the ethnomusicologist and composer who spent decades collecting and transcribing Armenian folk songs — survived the 1915 massacres only to suffer a complete psychological collapse from which he never recovered. He spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Parisian psychiatric institution, dying in 1935 without returning to Armenia. The Armenian Soviet government repatriated his remains to Yerevan in 1936, where he was interred at the Komitas Pantheon.

This coin was issued as part of Armenia's ongoing cultural figures gold series. The .999 fineness is notably purer than the .900 standard common to most twentieth-century gold coinage programs.