1000 Dram Etchmiadzin Church

Etchmiadzin — formally the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin — is the administrative seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church and, by tradition, the site where Gregory the Illuminator directed the construction of the first Armenian cathedral in 301 AD, making the Armenian church among the oldest state-adopted Christian institutions on earth. This coin was issued the same year UNESCO added the cathedral complex to its World Heritage list, a designation Armenia pursued aggressively as part of post-Soviet cultural rehabilitation in the 1990s.

The .999 silver specification places it outside standard circulation coinage — produced for the collector market at a moment when Armenia was still issuing its first generation of commemorative series following dram reintroduction in 1993.