50 Dram

Armenia's first post-Soviet banknote series, introduced from 1993 onward, was designed domestically but printed abroad under contracts that shifted between issues. By 1998, the dram had survived a brutal inflationary episode — the early 1990s saw Armenian consumer prices rising at rates exceeding 5,000% annually — making even a modest 50-dram denomination a reminder of how far the currency had been stabilized by the time this note entered production.

Tigran Sargsyan later became Prime Minister of Armenia, a relatively unusual trajectory for a central bank governor whose signature appears on circulating paper.