100 Dram Vardges Sureniants

Vardges Sureniants (1860–1921) was among the most significant Armenian painters of the late imperial Russian period, trained in St. Petersburg and Munich before returning to document a civilization on the edge of catastrophe. He witnessed and survived the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s, and much of his mature work is inseparable from that trauma. Armenia's commemorative silver program has consistently used the 28.28g sterling format shared across dozens of national banks — but the choice of Sureniants specifically reflects a deliberate cultural recovery project that accelerated after independence in 1991.

He died in Yerevan in 1921, the year Soviet power was consolidated in Armenia.