10 Dram Earthquake of 1988

Issued a decade after the Spitak earthquake of December 7, 1988, which killed an estimated 25,000 people and left half a million homeless across northern Armenia. The quake measured 6.8 on the Richter scale and effectively leveled the city of Spitak entirely. Gorbachev cut short a visit to New York to return to the Soviet Union, and the disaster accelerated an already strained relationship between Moscow and the Armenian SSR at a particularly volatile moment in Soviet history.

Armenia's first commemorative coin program launched in 1994, two years after independence. This 1998 release falls within that early sovereign series.