5 Manat

Azerbaijan's first post-Soviet banknote series, of which this is part, was commissioned from Thomas De La Rue almost immediately after independence — a practical choice, as the country lacked any domestic printing infrastructure. The manat itself replaced the Soviet ruble at a time when hyperinflation had already badly eroded public confidence in paper currency, and these early notes entered circulation into an economy still deeply destabilized by the ongoing war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The 1993 series was superseded relatively quickly. A redenomination in 2006 replaced 5,000 old manat with a single new manat, rendering the entire first-generation series obsolete.