50 000 Drams Monument We Are Our Mountains

Artsakh — internationally recognized by almost no one, yet issuing its own coinage by 1998 — was a breakaway republic carved from the collapse of the Soviet Union through a war with Azerbaijan that ended in a 1994 ceasefire, not a peace treaty. The "We Are Our Mountains" monument in Stepanakert, erected by the Soviets in 1967, had by then been thoroughly reappropriated as the defining symbol of Armenian identity in the enclave. Issuing a coin around it was as much a political declaration as a numismatic exercise.

KM#4a denotes the gold-plated variant; a straight silver strike exists as KM#4.