100 Som Osh - 3000th Anniversary

Osh's claim to 3,000 years of continuous settlement rests primarily on Soviet-era archaeological work at Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain at the city's center. Whether the dating holds to strict scrutiny is debatable among historians, but the Kyrgyz government committed to the anniversary as a nation-building moment in the early post-independence decade — this coin was part of that official programme.

The National Bank issued extremely limited quantities of this and companion pieces as the country was still establishing its commemorative coinage infrastructure, barely a decade after the som itself was introduced in 1993.