3 Qəpik Gold

Azerbaijan's earliest gold bullion issues, produced in the mid-2000s, coincided with the country's rapidly expanding oil revenues following the opening of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline in 2005 — a moment when the Central Bank had both the political motive and the hard currency reserves to enter the commemorative and bullion coin market seriously. The qəpik denomination itself had been dormant in practice; inflation had rendered fractional coinage effectively worthless in everyday commerce, making this a purely numismatic exercise from the outset.