100 Som Millennium of Manas

Manas is the central figure of an oral epic poem belonging to the Kyrgyz people — at roughly 500,000 lines, it is among the longest epic poems in recorded literary history, dwarfing both the Iliad and the Mahabharata. The 1995 issue marks what Kyrgyz scholars designated as the epic's thousandth anniversary, a date that is approximate at best, since the poem's origins are genuinely contested and likely predate any fixed point scholars can reliably pin down.

The Kyrgyz Republic had gained independence from the Soviet Union only four years earlier, and this coin was among the first gold issues the National Bank produced as a sovereign institution.