1000 Drams Van Lake

The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was a self-declared state whose international recognition never extended beyond a handful of similarly unrecognized entities. Issuing coinage was, for such governments, a deliberate act of asserting statehood infrastructure — but these pieces circulated nowhere and were produced almost exclusively for the collector market through foreign minting arrangements.

Van Lake, straddling present-day eastern Turkey, carries particular weight in Armenian historical memory as the center of one of the densest pre-genocide Armenian populations in Anatolia.