10 000 Roubles The Novodevichy Convent

Part of the Bank of Russia's ongoing architectural monuments series, this piece commemorates the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. The convent has served alternately as a place of forced religious retreat for politically inconvenient women — including Peter the Great's half-sister Sophia Alexeyevna, confined there after the Streltsy uprising of 1698 — and as a functioning monastery that survived Soviet-era secularization largely intact, operating as a museum branch of the State Historical Museum from 1934.

At just over one kilogram of .999 fine gold, pieces in this series were struck in extremely limited quantities, typically under 150 examples per issue.