500 Tenge Y. Altynsarin

Ybrai Altynsarin was a 19th-century Kazakh educator and writer who created the first Kazakh-language primer using a Cyrillic-based alphabet, breaking from the Arabic script then standard across the steppe. His schools, built among nomadic communities in the 1860s and 1870s under Russian imperial administration, were the first secular institutions many Kazakhs had encountered. The National Bank has issued several coins in this commemorative education series, each honoring a figure whose influence shaped Kazakh intellectual identity before Soviet cultural policy absorbed and reframed that same legacy.