20 Roubles D'Artagnan

Belarus launched an ambitious commemorative program in the mid-2000s celebrating literary and fictional heroes, and the Three Musketeers series sits among its more technically elaborate entries. This piece employs pad printing — a process borrowed from industrial manufacturing that transfers ink onto curved surfaces via a silicone pad — which was still a relatively novel application in numismatics when this coin was struck. The combination of chemical oxidation, applied zircon, and pad-printed color on a single flan required sequential production steps that made each piece unusually labor-intensive by mint standards.

D'Artagnan himself, of course, was not Belarusian — Dumas set him in 17th-century France. The National Bank's choice reflects the broader post-Soviet appetite for internationally recognized cultural figures rather than strictly national ones.