20 Roubles Porthos

Issued as part of Belarus's extended commemorative series drawn from Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, this coin depicts Porthos, the most physically imposing of the four principal characters. Belarus was notably prolific in literary commemoratives during the late 2000s, producing elaborately themed series at a time when the country's collector coin program was aggressively expanding its export market. The pad-printed color elements and synthetic orange zircon insertion were production techniques increasingly favored by the Mint of Poland, which struck the majority of Belarusian collector issues of this period under contract.