100 Tenge Abai Kunanbaev - Madrasa

Part of Kazakhstan's first commemorative silver series issued following independence, this coin honors Abai Qunanbaiuly, the 19th-century Kazakh poet and philosopher whose work was suppressed under Soviet rule and only fully rehabilitated after 1991. The madrasa reference connects to Abai's formal education in Semipalatinsk, where he studied Islamic scripture and classical literature — an education that would later inform his translations of Pushkin and Lermontov into Kazakh.

The series was produced at the Kazakhstan Mint in its earliest operational years, when the country had only just introduced the tenge in November 1993.