50 Drams Owl

Nagorno-Karabakh struck this coin while its political existence was already in question — the 2020 war with Azerbaijan had ended just months earlier with a Russian-brokered ceasefire that left the republic in a sharply diminished territorial state. Coinage continued as an assertion of administrative function, even as the Armenian-backed government operated under conditions of effective siege.

KM# 105 belongs to the republic's wildlife series, a program that ran for years producing aluminium bronze issues in modest quantities for a population that increasingly used Armenian drams in daily commerce.