500 Tenge Umai. Mountain Altai

Umai is a protective deity in Turkic mythology, associated with children, fertility, and the hearth — one of the oldest figures in the pre-Islamic spiritual traditions of the steppe peoples. Kazakhstan's series of silver issues from this period drew deliberately on that pre-Islamic cultural inheritance, a pointed curatorial choice for a government navigating national identity construction a decade after Soviet dissolution. The Mountain Altai, shared across Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China, holds particular weight in Turkic cosmology as a sacred ancestral homeland.