100 Som Millennium of Manas

Manas is the central figure of an oral epic tradition among the Kyrgyz people that runs to roughly 500,000 lines — by some reckonings the longest epic poem in the world. The 1995 issue was part of Kyrgyzstan's broader commemorative program following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, during which the National Bank moved quickly to establish a numismatic identity around specifically Kyrgyz cultural heritage rather than shared Soviet iconography. The "millennium" framing refers to the approximate thousand-year age scholars attributed to the Manas tradition, though the epic's precise origins remain disputed among Central Asian historians.