500 Manat Shirkebir Mausoleum

Turkmenistan's commemorative coinage program of the late 1990s and early 2000s was orchestrated almost entirely as an instrument of President Saparmurat Niyazov's personality cult and national mythology-building project. The Shirkebir Mausoleum at Anau, a fifteenth-century Timurid structure, was severely damaged by the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake — one of the deadliest seismic events in Soviet history, killing an estimated 110,000 people in a city of roughly 130,000.

Niyazov, who survived the earthquake as a child, later made its ruins a focal point of constructed Turkmen national identity.