500 Tenge Bessikke Salu

Bessikke Salu — literally "putting the child in the cradle" — is one of the forty traditional Kazakh rites of passage collectively known as the qyrqynan shyğaru cycle, marking the first forty days of an infant's life. This 2006 issue belongs to a broader National Bank series documenting Kazakh customs that faced systematic suppression during the Soviet period, when such ceremonies were officially discouraged as remnants of pre-socialist culture. The series was itself a deliberate act of cultural reclamation following independence in 1991.