50 000 Drams Mesrop Mashtots

The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, internationally unrecognized and operating under a de facto Armenian administration following the 1994 ceasefire, issued this coin partly to assert institutional legitimacy through the trappings of a sovereign monetary authority. The choice of Mesrop Mashtots — the 5th-century monk who invented the Armenian alphabet — was deliberate: a cultural claim as much as a commemorative one.

No commercial banking infrastructure existed to circulate these pieces. They were produced for the collector market, with the Armenian dram functioning as actual currency in the territory.