25 Apsars Leon II

Leon II ruled Abkhazia in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and is credited with breaking the kingdom's ecclesiastical dependence on Constantinople, shifting the church's allegiance to Antioch — a rare instance of a small Caucasian polity deliberately engineering its own religious autonomy as a geopolitical move. The Bank of Abkhazia has issued numismatic series drawing on medieval Abkhazian royal history partly as a sovereignty claim in material form, given that the territory's political status remains unresolved under international law, recognized as an independent state by only a handful of UN members.