500 Manat Seyitnazar Seydi

Seyitnazar Seydi (1768–1833) was one of the foundational figures of classical Turkmen literature, a poet whose work circulated orally for generations before being formally collected and published in the Soviet period. Turkmenistan's post-independence commemorative program, launched in the early 1990s under Saparmurat Niyazov, leaned heavily on such pre-Soviet cultural figures as a way of constructing a national literary canon distinct from the Russian imperial and Soviet frameworks that had previously defined official culture.

The 2003 issue falls within the second wave of that program, by which point the Central Bank had standardized on the 28.28 g sterling specification widely used in the international commemorative market of the period.