500 Tenge Apple Blossom

Kazakhstan launched a long-running nature series in the 2000s that drew heavily on the country's biological heritage — fitting, given that Almaty's name derives from the Kazakh word for apple, and wild apple forests in the Tian Shan mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan are now recognized by botanists as the ancestral origin of virtually all domesticated apple varieties worldwide. The coin was issued the same year UNESCO formally acknowledged that genetic diversity.