1000 Drams Vardan Mamikonyan

Nagorno-Karabakh's commemorative coinage program, launched in the early 2000s, was as much a sovereignty assertion as a numismatic exercise — the unrecognized republic used silver issues like this one to project statehood through objects that circulated internationally among collectors even when the territory itself had no recognized borders. Vardan Mamikonyan, the Armenian military commander who led the rebellion against Sasanian Persian rule and died at the Battle of Avarayr in 451 AD, carries particular resonance here: his fight for Christian Armenian identity against a dominant empire mapped neatly onto the Karabakh nationalist narrative of the 1990s conflict.