1000 Drams Aghtamar

Artsakh — the self-declared republic governing the territory also known as Nagorno-Karabakh — issued collector coinage in the early 2000s partly as an assertion of institutional legitimacy, minting pieces that few countries would officially recognize. Aghtamar, the subject of this coin, is a tenth-century Armenian church on an island in Lake Van, located in present-day Turkey — a site of acute symbolic weight for Armenians following the catastrophic displacement of 1915.

The church sat abandoned and roofless for decades before Turkish authorities permitted a limited restoration completed around 2010.