1000 Dram Lazarev Institute

The Lazarev Institute (formally the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages) was founded in Moscow in 1815 by the Armenian Lazarian family — one of the wealthiest dynasties in the Russian Empire — and functioned as the primary institution for Armenian cultural and intellectual life in Russia for over a century. It trained generations of diplomats, scholars, and translators, and its press published foundational Armenian-language texts at a time when no such printing infrastructure existed within Armenian-populated territories under Ottoman or Persian control.

This coin marks the institution's bicentennial.