50 Manat Ashgabat

Issued to commemorate Ashgabat, Turkmenistan's capital city rebuilt almost entirely from scratch after a catastrophic 1948 earthquake that killed an estimated 110,000 people — roughly two-thirds of the city's population at the time. Soviet authorities suppressed the true death toll for decades. The reconstruction under Niyazov and later Berdymukhamedov transformed the city into a showcase of white marble architecture, and the commemorative coin program of this period was explicitly tied to state image-building around that transformation.