100 Dram Aram Khachatryan

Aram Khachaturian — the spelling on this coin's name renders in varying transliterations — composed the Sabre Dance in a single night in 1942 under pressure from a looming deadline for his ballet Gayane. It became one of the most performed orchestral pieces of the 20th century, though Khachaturian himself reportedly grew weary of its ubiquity. Born in Tiflis in 1903 to an Armenian bookbinder, he didn't begin formal music study until his late teens in Moscow.

Armenia's commemorative silver program of the early 2000s drew heavily on cultural figures as the young republic built a national iconographic vocabulary after Soviet dissolution.