25 Dram Temple of Garni

Armenia's first commemorative coin series, issued in 1994, appeared just three years after independence from the Soviet Union — the Central Bank itself had only been established in 1993. The Temple of Garni, a first-century Hellenistic structure surviving largely intact near Yerevan, was a deliberate choice: it had been rebuilt between 1969 and 1975 under Soviet direction, a project that carried its own complicated politics around Armenian cultural identity.

The 1994 series represents Yerevan's earliest attempt at sovereign numismatic issue, and production was contracted abroad given the absence of domestic minting infrastructure at the time.