> [Maxim](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again) / [Apakabar Cash: Money of the World](https://wikilayer.org/smee-again/apakabar.cash) / Georgian lari

# Georgian lari

**Contents:**

- [5 lari](#5-lari)
  - [Obverse: Ivane Javakhishvili](#obverse-ivane-javakhishvili)
  - [Reverse: Pirosmani's Threshing and Fisherman in a Red Shirt](#reverse-pirosmanis-threshing-and-fisherman-in-a-red-shirt)
    - [Discovery (1912–1913)](#discovery-1912-1913)
    - [The Margarita legend](#the-margarita-legend)
    - [Death and afterlife (1918)](#death-and-afterlife-1918)
  - [Specifications and security](#specifications-and-security)
- [10 lari](#10-lari)
  - [Obverse: Akaki Tsereteli](#obverse-akaki-tsereteli)
  - [Reverse: David Kakabadze's Imereti, My Mother](#reverse-david-kakabadzes-imereti-my-mother)
  - [Specifications and security](#specifications-and-security)
- [20 lari](#20-lari)
  - [Obverse: Ilia Chavchavadze](#obverse-ilia-chavchavadze)
  - [Reverse: Old Tbilisi](#reverse-old-tbilisi)
  - [Specifications and security](#specifications-and-security)
- [50 lari](#50-lari)
  - [Obverse: Queen Tamar](#obverse-queen-tamar)
  - [Reverse: Sagittarius and the manuscript miniature](#reverse-sagittarius-and-the-manuscript-miniature)
  - [Specifications and security](#specifications-and-security)
- [100 lari](#100-lari)
  - [Obverse: Shota Rustaveli](#obverse-shota-rustaveli)
  - [Reverse: Tbilisi Opera and the national anthem](#reverse-tbilisi-opera-and-the-national-anthem)
  - [Specifications and security](#specifications-and-security)
- [200 lari](#200-lari)
  - [Obverse: Kakutsa Cholokashvili](#obverse-kakutsa-cholokashvili)
  - [Reverse: Sukhumi](#reverse-sukhumi)
  - [Specifications and design](#specifications-and-design)
- [500 lari](#500-lari)
  - [Obverse: David IV the Builder](#obverse-david-iv-the-builder)
  - [Reverse: the Bolnisi Cross](#reverse-the-bolnisi-cross)
  - [An unissued banknote](#an-unissued-banknote)

The Georgian lari was introduced by the [National Bank of Georgia](page:4530) on 2 October 1995, at one lari to a million kuponi, ending three years of post-independence hyperinflation. The whole series was drawn by the Georgian artist Bacha Malazonia.

Five working denominations make up the current refreshed series, issued between February 2016 and October 2019: the 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 lari. Across them the new notes honour figures from nine centuries of Georgian cultural and political life: the historian who founded Tbilisi State University, the poet of *Suliko* and his fellow leader of the 19th-century national revival, the queen of the medieval Golden Age, and the 12th-century epic poet who served at her court. The blindmark on the edge runs 1-2-3-4-5 lines from the smallest denomination up, so a Georgian can identify any note by touch.

Two further denominations stand outside the refresh. The 200 lari with the anti-Soviet partisan Kakutsa Cholokashvili on the front and a view of Sukhumi on the back was issued separately in 2007 as a Georgian political statement on territorial integrity; it remains legal tender in vanishing circulation. The 500 lari with King David the Builder and the Bolnisi Cross was designed in 1995 for the original launch, but never put into the public's hands.

## 5 lari

### Obverse: Ivane Javakhishvili

When Tbilisi's new university opened on 26 January 1918, the founders chose the date for the commemoration of King David the Builder, the 12th-century monarch who appears on the reverse of the 500 lari. The Georgian Free University Society, formed the previous May in the apartment of the chemist Petre Melikishvili and chaired by the historian Ekvtime Takaishvili, had spent eight months preparing. Melikishvili was elected first rector on Javakhishvili's nomination; Javakhishvili himself headed the single Faculty of Philosophy, which housed humanities, natural sciences and mathematics under one roof. Eighteen professors, three hundred sixty-nine matriculated students and eighty-nine free listeners filed into the lecture halls. Javakhishvili gave the first lecture. It was the first university in the Caucasus.

The premises were not new: the former Georgian Nobility Gymnasium, built between 1899 and 1906 by the Georgian architect Simon Kldiashvili, had been the most ambitious school project in late-imperial Tiflis. The university has remained there since.

Ivane Javakhishvili (1876–1940) had been preparing for the moment most of his adult life. Born in Tbilisi to Prince Alexander Javakhishvili, who taught at the Gymnasium that would become the university, he graduated from Saint Petersburg University's Faculty of Oriental Studies in 1899 and stayed on as a lecturer in Armenian and Georgian philology. He spent 1901–1902 at the University of Berlin and travelled to Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai with Nikolai Marr to catalogue medieval Georgian manuscripts. Volume one of his *History of the Georgian Nation* appeared in 1908; the complete edition would run through 1949, the foundational synthesis of pre-modern Georgian history. He produced more than 170 scholarly works.

He served as rector from 1919 to 1926, well past the absorption of independent Georgia into the Soviet Union in 1921. In 1936 a thesis by the new Stalin-era rector attacked his scholarship; in 1938 he was forced to resign. His successor was shot in the Great Purge two years later. Javakhishvili survived by retreating to the State Museum of Georgia, where he ran the history department until his death in November 1940. The university now carries his name.

![Obverse of the 5-lari Georgian banknote, showing an engraved portrait of Ivane Javakhishvili against a wing of the university's main building, with a facsimile signature curling beside the denomination](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/2db26f867b11a988.jpg)

The portrait is set against a wing of the university's main building, with a facsimile of Javakhishvili's signature curling beside the denomination.

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Reverse: Pirosmani's Threshing and Fisherman in a Red Shirt

The five-lari reverse pairs two of Niko Pirosmanashvili's best-known canvases. *Fisherman in a Red Shirt* (1908) is oil on black oilcloth, 111 × 89.5 cm, in the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts within the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. *Threshing the Floor in a Georgian Country Village* (1915) is oil on cardboard, 80 × 100 cm, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Both belong to the rural and working-life subjects that fill perhaps a third of his surviving output.

Pirosmani (1862–1918) was born in the Kakhetian village of Mirzaani, orphaned at eight, and grew up in Tbilisi in the household of the wealthy Armenian-Georgian Kalantarov family. He taught himself to paint and spent thirty years making signboards and portraits for the keepers of the city's dukhans, the cellar taverns of the old town, in exchange for food, drink and a place to sleep. His preferred ground was black oilcloth, which he left exposed at the edges of every form: the dark fabric reads as deep shadow and gives even his sunlit scenes a night-for-day quality. *Fisherman in a Red Shirt* is the canonical example. Kirill Zdanevich, one of the painters who first championed him, wrote that the canvas recalled Derain and Matisse.

The National Bank of Georgia chose pastoral subjects rather than the more famous portraits, the actresses and circus animals: a working country and a working man, on the note Georgians most often hand to a cashier.

![Reverse of the 5-lari Georgian banknote, showing two Pirosmani paintings side by side: on the left, peasants threshing wheat with raised flails in a rural Georgian village; on the right, a solitary fisherman in a vivid red tunic and yellow hat holding a fish against a stark landscape](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/516eb694f1352739.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

#### Discovery (1912–1913)

The futurist brothers Kirill and Ilia Zdanevich and the painter Mikhail Le-Dantyu found Pirosmani in the summer of 1912, working their way through the dukhans of Tiflis and noticing the signboards above the doors. They tracked him down, bought everything they could from him and from the tavern keepers who had been holding his canvases as collateral against bar tabs, and started writing about him.

Ilia Zdanevich's first piece, *Khudozhnik-samorodok* ("The Self-Made Artist"), appeared in the Tiflis press on 10 February 1913. Six weeks later, on 24 March 1913, Pirosmani's work was hanging on Bolshaya Dmitrovka in Moscow, in *Mishen'* (The Target), the exhibition Mikhail Larionov staged to launch Rayonism. Pirosmani was shown beside Larionov, Goncharova, Chagall and Malevich, and beside the painted lubki, shop signboards and works by other self-taught painters whom Larionov had deliberately curated as the same lineage. Twelve thousand people came; thirty-one works sold. It was Pirosmani's first appearance outside Tiflis.

In June 1914 Ilia Zdanevich followed up with a longer piece in the Petersburg journal *Vostok*, where he half-invented the Pirosmani legend that the rest of the century inherited.

#### The Margarita legend

The most-told Pirosmani anecdote is the May 1905 visit to Tiflis by the French chanteuse Margarita de Sèvres, performing at the Parisian theatre Belle-Vue in Mushtaid Park. Pirosmani is said to have sold his tavern that night, bought every flower he could find in the city, and piled them on her hotel doorstep at dawn: nine carts of lilac, acacia, hawthorn, begonias, anemones, honeysuckle, lilies, poppies and peonies, not just roses. The pair never met. She accepted an invitation from a wealthier admirer and left for Paris by the end of the run.

Pirosmani painted *Actress Marguerite* a few years later, around 1909, in the same flat-figured, black-oilcloth manner he had perfected for the dukhan signboards. In 1969 the painting travelled to a Pirosmani retrospective at the Louvre, where an elderly French woman stood in front of it for some time, then introduced herself to the staff as Margarita de Sèvres.

Raymonds Pauls's melody first appeared in 1981 as *Dāvāja Māriņa meitenei mūžiņu*, a Latvian song about a mother's hardship with words by Leons Briedis, sung by Aija Kukule and Līga Kreicberga. The following year Andrei Voznesensky mapped Pauls's tune onto the Pirosmani story: Melodiya released the Russian "Million alykh roz" (A Million Scarlet Roses) on a 7-inch in December 1982, and Alla Pugacheva sang it on the New Year's broadcast of 2 January 1983. It became the song of the decade across the Soviet bloc, and the most popular single ever released in Japan, Finland and Mongolia. Pugacheva later said she hated the lyric.

#### Death and afterlife (1918)

Pirosmani lived his last winter in the basement of 29 Molokan Street in Tbilisi, the lane that now bears his name. He was found unconscious there on Easter Saturday, 30 March 1918, taken to a hospital for the poor, and died about a week later, around 7 April, of the influenza that killed roughly forty million people that year, complicated by years of malnutrition. He was buried somewhere in the common section of the Kukia cemetery in northern Tbilisi; no marker was set.

By that point his reputation among the Russian and Georgian avant-garde was a settled fact, but most of his oilcloths were still wherever he had left them: behind a bar, above a doorway, in a back room. The hundred and forty-six canvases now at the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum were assembled over the rest of the century.

Picasso etched a portrait of Pirosmani in homage. Ilia Zdanevich, by then living in Paris under the pseudonym Iliazd, wrote and printed a fine-press monograph in 1972, sixty years after the discovery he had helped to make. Eduard Kuznetsov's 1983 catalogue raisonné remains the standard reference, and the Albertina in Vienna and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel have since mounted major retrospectives.

### Specifications and security

62 × 122 mm, brown, issued on 1 September 2017 by NBG executive director Giorgi Melashvili at a press conference at the Bank's Cash Centre in Tbilisi.

The blindmark is **one** horizontal raised line on each edge; the hologram carries a **lion**; the optical variable ink shifts gold to green on tilt. The 5 lari predates six of the security features that NBG added to the 10 lari two years later.

For the wider design and the full security suite see [The 2016–2019 upgrade](page:4578).

## 10 lari

### Obverse: Akaki Tsereteli

Akaki Tsereteli was born on 9 June 1840 in Skhvitori, a village in the Imereti hills of western Georgia. His father, Prince Rostom Tsereteli, headed a senior branch of an old Imerian house; his mother, Princess Ekaterine, was a great-granddaughter of King Solomon I of Imereti. By family custom the infant was sent to the nearby village of Savane to be nursed by a peasant family, in the milk-brother arrangement that knit Imerian nobility to its tenants. Tsereteli would later credit those years with the fact that his Georgian sounded the way it did: not the language of the manor but the language of the people across the orchard wall.

He went to the Kutaisi Classical Gymnasium in 1850 and to the Faculty of Oriental Languages at Saint Petersburg University, from which he graduated in 1863. He returned a Tergdaleuli, one of "those who had drunk from the Terek": the Petersburg-educated Georgian generation who, crossing the Terek River on their way home from Russia, came back as cultural nationalists. With Ilia Chavchavadze (on the 20 lari), Niko Nikoladze, and Jacob Gogebashvili, Tsereteli spent the next half-century building modern Georgian print culture from inside the Russian empire: schoolbooks, newspapers, literary journals, a national theatre, and several hundred of his own poems that two generations took to memory.

The poem outsiders know is *Suliko* ("Little Soul"), written in 1895. Tsereteli sent the verses to his young cousin, the composer Varinka Tsereteli, asking her to set them to music; the lyric was printed soon afterwards in the literary journal *Kvali*. The poem follows a man wandering in search of the grave of his beloved Suliko, finding her presence instead in a rose, a nightingale and a star. Joseph Stalin made the Russian translation his radio favourite; Soviet choirs took *Suliko* into German, Polish, Chinese, Basque, Hebrew and a dozen other languages. Georgia placed it on its national register of intangible cultural heritage in 2024.

Tsereteli died at Skhvitori on 26 January 1915, on the Julian calendar then still in force in Russia. His coffin was carried east through Imereti and into Tbilisi by train; thousands walked alongside the cortège as it passed through Kutaisi. He was buried on the slope of Mount Mtatsminda above Tbilisi, where Georgian writers had been laid since the early 19th century; the modern Mtatsminda Pantheon, where Georgia now formally honours its national figures, was first proposed at his graveside that week and constituted as such in 1929. Three years after his death, the same date, 26 January, became the founding day of Tbilisi State University, the institution honoured on the 5 lari.

![Obverse of the 10-lari Georgian banknote: engraved portrait of Akaki Tsereteli on the right, a swallow flying over a flowering branch on the left, an excerpt of his poem Spring in his own handwriting, and the denomination 10 in blue](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/8c0e60b5b7ee24ea.jpg)

The portrait shows Tsereteli late in life. To his left, a swallow flies over a flowering branch; both motifs come from his poem *Spring*, whose opening lines run in his own handwriting beside them.

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=8), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Reverse: David Kakabadze's Imereti, My Mother

The reverse reproduces *Imereti, My Mother* (1918) by David Kakabadze, oil on canvas, 139 × 157 cm, in the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. The painting sets a realistic portrait of the artist's mother, seated in dark Imerian dress in the foreground, against a panorama of Imereti not painted as a panorama: hills, fields, terraced orchards and a distant church are dissolved into fields of geometric colour, half medieval tapestry and half Synthetic Cubism. The Coat of Arms of Georgia sits between the figure and the right edge of the note.

Kakabadze painted *Imereti, My Mother* in the seven months between Georgia's declaration of independence on 26 May 1918 and his departure for Paris early the following year. The Democratic Republic of Georgia would last until February 1921, when the Red Army arrived; the painting outlived the republic and became the canonical image of Imereti.

David Kakabadze (1889–1952) is the only avant-garde painter on Georgian currency, and the only one with international patents to his name. Born into a peasant family in the village of Kukhi near Khoni, also in Imereti, he was sponsored through school by local benefactors and graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1916, where he had read natural sciences. From 1919 to 1927 he lived in Paris and exhibited at the Société des Artistes Indépendants alongside his Georgian contemporaries Lado Gudiashvili and Shalva Kikodze. He worked through subjectless painting and Cubism into a series of "constructions" in metal, mirror glass and stained glass, mounted on relief panels.

Between 1922 and 1925, in parallel with the painting, Kakabadze patented a stereoscopic film projector in eight countries, beginning with French patent no. 547,978, *Stéréo cinématographe donnant la vision du relief naturel*. He had built the camera in 1923 to capture moving images with apparent depth, and is counted among the first inventors of three-dimensional cinema. The patents lapsed without a buyer.

He returned to Tbilisi in 1927 and the following year became a professor at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, painting Imerian landscapes and industrial scenes in a continued geometric idiom. The Soviet authorities pressed him through the 1930s and 1940s to abandon "formalism"; he was dismissed from the Academy in 1948 and died in Tbilisi four years later.

![Reverse of the 10-lari Georgian banknote: David Kakabadze's painting Imereti, My Mother showing the artist's mother seated in dark Imerian dress in the foreground against multicolored geometric blue and green hills, with the Coat of Arms of Georgia at upper right](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/294dd87eb24819bf.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=8), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Specifications and security

64 × 127 mm, blue, issued on 1 October 2019 as the last of the upgraded series.

The blindmark is **two** horizontal raised lines on each edge; the hologram carries a **swallow**, the bird that opens Tsereteli's poem *Spring*; the optical variable ink shifts green to blue on tilt. The 10 lari adds six security features absent from the 2017 5 lari, including a magnetic-ink serial number, infrared-detectable graphical detail, a phosphorescent denomination square, and several ultraviolet-reactive elements.

For the wider design and the full security suite see [The 2016–2019 upgrade](page:4578).

## 20 lari

### Obverse: Ilia Chavchavadze

Ilia Chavchavadze was born on 27 October 1837 in Kvareli, in the Alazani Valley of eastern Georgia. He was the third son of Prince Grigol Chavchavadze; the family seat is now the Ilia Chavchavadze Kvareli State Museum. He left the Caucasus for Saint Petersburg University in 1857 and read law there until 1861, when he returned a Tergdaleuli with the rest of his Petersburg cohort, Akaki Tsereteli (on the 10 lari), Niko Nikoladze and Jacob Gogebashvili among them, and threw his career into the Georgian national press.

Chavchavadze edited the journal *Sakartvelos Moambe* (The Georgian Herald) from 1863 to 1877 and founded the newspaper *Iveria*, which he edited from 1877 until 1905; both became the central instruments of the Georgian cultural revival under the Russian empire. He wrote poetry, novels, satire and editorials, practised as a lawyer, served on the board of the Tbilisi Nobles' Bank, and led the campaign for Georgian-language schools and a national theatre. Admirers called him *Mama Eris*, Father of the Nation; everyone else in literate Georgia simply called him Ilia.

On 28 August 1907 Chavchavadze was travelling with his wife Olga Guramishvili from Tbilisi to their estate at Saguramo, north of Mtskheta. Six men ambushed the carriage near the village of Tsitsamuri and shot him at the roadside. The identity of the assassins and the order behind them have been disputed by Georgian historians ever since; his funeral was the largest seen in Tbilisi to that date. Olga turned the Saguramo house over to the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians, the cause to which Ilia had bound the family income, and the estate is now the Ilia Chavchavadze Saguramo State Museum, where the writing kit shown on the 20 lari is on display.

The Georgian Orthodox Church canonised Chavchavadze in 1987 as Saint Ilia the Righteous (*Tsmidi Ilia Mtsignobari*, "Saint Ilia the Pious"). A central avenue of Tbilisi in the Vake district carries his name.

![Obverse of the 20-lari Georgian banknote, showing an engraved portrait of Ilia Chavchavadze in formal jacket on the right, the masthead of his newspaper Iveria, the publishing-house building, his signature, and his desk objects (a reading lens, a pocket watch, a pen and an inkpot) arranged across a magenta ground](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/b10d03f5d1f565cd.jpg)

The portrait stands beside the masthead of *Iveria*, the building of its publishing-house in Tbilisi, Ilia's signature, and the four objects from his desk at Saguramo that the museum preserves: a reading lens, a pocket watch, a steel pen and an inkpot.

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=7), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Reverse: Old Tbilisi

The reverse layers Tbilisi across fifteen hundred years. Behind the denomination, the panorama is the view of the old town from the right bank of the Mtkvari: tiled-roof houses climbing toward the 4th-century Narikala fortress on Sololaki Ridge. Set into the panorama in a faint overprint sits Prince Vakhushti Bagrationi's 1735 plan of the city. On the right of the note, the equestrian statue of King Vakhtang Gorgasali, mounted in 1967 on a rock above the river beside the 13th-century Metekhi Church, looks out across the same panorama. The Coat of Arms of Georgia sits at the upper right.

Vakhtang I Gorgasali ruled the kingdom of Iberia from somewhere around 447 to 502 and is credited by Georgian chronicle with founding Tbilisi in the second half of the 5th century. The story, told most fully in Leonti Mroveli's 11th-century *Life of Kartli*, is that the king was hunting on the wooded hills north of the Mtkvari when his falcon struck a pheasant in flight; the wounded bird fell into a hot sulphur spring, was either healed or boiled depending on the version, and Vakhtang, struck by the sight of bubbling water in the wilderness, ordered a city to be built around the springs. He named it *Tbilisi*, from *tbili*, "warm". The same sulphur springs are still in use at the Abanotubani bath quarter a five-minute walk from the spot the monument now occupies.

Prince Vakhushti (1696–1757), son of King Vakhtang VI of Kartli, completed the *Description of the Kingdom of Georgia* and its accompanying geographical atlas in 1735 in Moscow, where his family had been exiled after the failure of his father's rebellion against Iranian suzerainty. The atlas remains the earliest comprehensive cartography of Georgia; UNESCO inscribed the manuscripts on its Memory of the World Register in 2013.

Elguja Amashukeli's thirteen-metre bronze of Vakhtang on horseback was set on its rock above the Mtkvari in 1967, in the Soviet decade when Tbilisi monumentalised its founder. The cliff site, between the king's discovery legend and the modern bath quarter beneath him, is now the photographable centre of the old town.

![Reverse of the 20-lari Georgian banknote, showing a panoramic view of old Tbilisi with the Narikala fortress on the hill at left, the equestrian Vakhtang Gorgasali statue on the right, and the Coat of Arms of Georgia at upper right, with Vakhushti's 1735 city plan superimposed as a faint overprint across the panorama](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/32c1aaee1b5dc466.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=7), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Specifications and security

66 × 132 mm, magenta, issued on 1 February 2016 alongside the 50 lari as the first wave of the refresh.

The blindmark is **three** horizontal raised lines on each edge; the hologram carries a **phaeton**, the horse-drawn carriage of old Tiflis that Chavchavadze knew his city by; the optical variable ink shifts magenta to green on tilt.

For the wider design and the full security suite see [The 2016–2019 upgrade](page:4578).

## 50 lari

### Obverse: Queen Tamar

The figure on the obverse is recorded in the Georgian inscription as *Tamar Mep'e* (თამარ მეფე XII ს.), "Tamar the King, twelfth century." The Georgian word *mepe* takes no gender; Tamar carries the male title because the throne came to her in her own right, and her father King George III declared her co-monarch in 1178 to head off objections to a female successor. She ruled alone from his death in 1184 until her own in 1213, the central twenty-nine years of what Georgian historiography names the country's Golden Age.

Her first marriage, to Yury Bogolyubsky of the Grand Principality of Vladimir in northern Rus', ended in 1188; she annulled it on grounds of his drunkenness and worse, expelled him from Georgia, and defeated the two coups he later led against her with mercenary armies from Constantinople. Her second marriage, to the Ossetian prince David Soslan, lasted until his death in 1207 and produced both her successors, George IV "Lasha" and Queen Rusudan. Coins struck in her reign carry her title in Arabic Christian script: "Champion of the Messiah."

The empire she ran at its widest reached from Trebizond on the Black Sea to the western shore of the Caspian and into northern Iran. After the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204, her cousins Alexios and David Komnenos used Georgian troops to install themselves as the founding emperors of Trebizond, a line that ran for two and a half centuries afterwards. The Georgian Orthodox Church canonised her as Saint Tamar; she lies buried at Gelati Monastery, the Bagrationi cathedral-pantheon outside Kutaisi.

Behind her portrait the note carries two of the buildings of her reign. **Vardzia**, on the left, is the cave city of southern Georgia that her father had begun as a refuge against Seljuk and Mongol raids and that Tamar extended into a self-sufficient settlement: at its zenith, 6,000 rooms on nineteen levels were carved 500 metres into the cliff above the Mtkvari, with chapels, defensive galleries, an apothecary and quarters for two hundred resident monks. The 1283 earthquake shaved away half the cliff and exposed the inner caves to weather; about 641 chambers across thirteen levels survive today, all on Georgia's UNESCO tentative list.

Below the portrait sits a bas-relief from **Pitareti**, the cross-in-square monastery of the Mother of God in Kvemo Kartli, raised between 1213 and 1222 by Tamar's son George IV in the first years after her death. Pitareti's stone ornament, with its peacock, deer, lion, vine and pomegranate, is the high point of the Tamarite carving school's continuation under her heirs.

![Obverse of the 50-lari Georgian banknote, showing an engraved portrait of Queen Tamar in regal robes and crown on the right side, the cave-monastery complex of Vardzia carved into a cliff on the left, a bas-relief panel from Pitareti monastery below the portrait, and the Georgian inscription "Tamar Mep'e" against a green ground](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/1d5a46e10c638801.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=12), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Reverse: Sagittarius and the manuscript miniature

The reverse reproduces, in vivid emerald monochrome, a 12th-century Georgian zodiac miniature of *Sagittarius*: a centaur drawing a longbow, half stallion below the waist and half armoured rider above. Surrounding the figure, the page carries old Georgian *nuskhuri* script, the round-letter book hand of the medieval Georgian church.

The choice is internally referential. Tamar's reign was the apex of Georgian book production. The *Vani Gospels* were commissioned at her request by the monk John the Unworthy at the Rhomana monastery in Constantinople and brought back to Georgia (they now sit in the Georgian National Center of Manuscripts in Tbilisi); the *Gelati Gospels* and the *Jruchi Gospels* are of the same generation. The Sagittarius on the note belongs to the wider body of late-12th-century illumination produced under Tamar's patronage, though the National Bank's description gives no shelf-mark for the specific manuscript.

The Coat of Arms of Georgia, with Saint George spearing the dragon at its centre, sits at the top right; the denomination repeats in Georgian and Latin script.

![Reverse of the 50-lari Georgian banknote, showing a luminous green miniature of Sagittarius the centaur archer drawing a longbow, surrounded by old Georgian nuskhuri script on aged parchment, with the Coat of Arms of Georgia at upper right and a large green "50" denomination on the right](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/d00b715169f20170.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=12), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Specifications and security

68 × 137 mm, green, issued on 1 February 2016 alongside the 20 lari.

The blindmark is **four** horizontal raised lines on each edge; the hologram carries a **griffin** on a bicolour stripe, a heraldic creature from the Tamarite reign; the optical variable magnetic ink shifts gold to green with a "rolling" wave effect on tilt, the upgrade over the simple tilt-shift on the lower denominations.

For the wider design and the full security suite see [The 2016–2019 upgrade](page:4578).

## 100 lari

### Obverse: Shota Rustaveli

Shota Rustaveli (c. 1160 – after c. 1220) was the court poet to Queen Tamar (on the 50 lari) and the author of the *Vepkhistqaosani*, the Georgian Golden Age's defining literary work. Born in the Meskhetian village of Rustavi, in southern Georgia, he reached Tamar's court as a young man, was probably appointed her *mechurchletukhutsesi*, royal high treasurer, and wrote the *Vepkhistqaosani* over the last decades of the twelfth century. The poem is preserved in the inscription on the note as "შოთა რუსთაველი XII ს."

The poem itself runs to more than 1,600 quatrains in the strict sixteen-syllable metre that has since carried the name *Rustavelian*. Its plot is a chivalric romance set ostensibly in Arabia and India: two friends, Avtandil and Tariel, ride across half a continent in search of the missing princess Nestan-Darejan, who is unmistakably Tamar in allegorical dress. The poem is read at Georgian weddings, recited from memory by schoolchildren, and quoted in court judgments to this day; in Georgia it is normally just called *Vepkhistqaosani*, never "the Rustaveli".

The surviving manuscript history is mostly late. No twelfth-century manuscript survives, the earliest extant copies date from the 1640s, the first printed edition was Vakhtang VI's 1712 Tbilisi edition. The note carries one ornament from a seventeenth-century manuscript of the poem and a page from the 1712 print. The first major Western translation, Marjory Wardrop's English *The Man in the Panther's Skin*, was published in London in 1912; her copy of the manuscript is now in Oxford.

The only contemporary portrait of Rustaveli that survives is also the one image of him in the world: a fresco on the eastern face of the southwest pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, where Rustaveli is said to have ended his days. The Monastery of the Cross was, then as now, Georgian Orthodox, and a Georgian inscription on the fresco names him as the sponsor of its restoration in the late 12th or early 13th century. The pilgrim Timote Gabashvili described the fresco in 1757–58; it disappeared under whitewash sometime afterwards and was rediscovered by a team of Georgian scholars in 1960. The likeness on the 100 lari is taken from that fresco.

Behind the portrait, the note carries an illustration of a scene from the *Vepkhistqaosani*, a page from the 1712 print edition, the ornament from a 17th-century manuscript, and on the lower left a 7th-century bas-relief of *Daniel in the Den of Lions* from Martvili Cathedral (the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary at Chkondidi, in Samegrelo), one of the surviving masterworks of early Christian Georgian sculpture.

![Obverse of the 100-lari Georgian banknote, showing an engraved portrait of Shota Rustaveli in a deep blue robe and Georgian hat based on the surviving Jerusalem fresco, with an illustration from the Knight in the Panther's Skin to his left, a page of the 1712 first printed edition and a manuscript ornament behind him, the bas-relief of Daniel in the lions' den at lower left, against a violet ground](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/da50ef4a456e20c7.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=9), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Reverse: Tbilisi Opera and the national anthem

The reverse shows the Zakaria Paliashvili Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre on Rustaveli Avenue, the central street of Tbilisi named for the poet on the obverse. Its current pseudo-Moorish facade, with alternating yellow and red-brick courses, pointed arches and corner turrets, dates from 1896 and was designed by the Baltic German architect Victor Schröter; an earlier Moorish Revival theatre on the same site, opened in April 1851 by the Italian architect Giovanni Scudieri, had burnt down in 1874. The interior was rebuilt twice more after fires, most recently between 2010 and 2016, the year this banknote was issued.

The theatre carries the name of **Zakaria Paliashvili** (1871–1933), the father of Georgian operatic music, whose operas *Abesalom and Eteri* (1919) and *Daisi* (1923) made him the national composer. The institution has been formally named for him since 1937.

Beside the theatre runs a fragment of the score of *Tavisupleba* ("Freedom"), the Georgian national anthem adopted by parliament on 20 May 2004 to replace the post-Soviet *Dideba*. The music is woven from two of Paliashvili's operas, *Abesalom and Eteri* and *Daisi*; the score on the note is therefore tied directly to the man whose name the theatre bears. The lyric, written for the new anthem by the poet David Magradze, begins "ჩემი ხატი არის შემოღანიღე", which translates as "My icon is my homeland."

The Coat of Arms of Georgia sits at the top right; the denomination repeats in Georgian and Latin script.

![Reverse of the 100-lari Georgian banknote, showing the Moorish Revival facade of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre on Rustaveli Avenue with its pointed arches and twin corner turrets, a fragment of the national anthem score to the right, the Coat of Arms of Georgia at upper right, and the denomination "100" in violet](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/76421f87dc03a1d1.jpg)

*Image: [National Bank of Georgia](https://nbg.gov.ge/en/georgian-money/banknotes?id=9), public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)).*

### Specifications and security

70 × 142 mm, violet, issued on 1 November 2016 as the second wave of the refresh.

The blindmark is **five** horizontal raised lines on each edge, the top of the tactile-denomination ladder that runs 1-2-3-4-5 across the series; the hologram carries a cluster of **flowers** on a bicolour stripe, from the garden of Rustaveli's metaphors; the optical variable magnetic ink shifts magenta to green with a "rolling" wave effect on tilt.

For the wider design and the full security suite see [The 2016–2019 upgrade](page:4578).

## 200 lari

### Obverse: Kakutsa Cholokashvili

Kaikhosro "Kakutsa" Cholokashvili (1888–1930) was the commander of the last large rebel formation to fight Soviet rule in Georgia. He was born on 14 July 1888 into a Kakhetian noble family, served as a decorated officer of the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War, and on his return found his country first independent (1918) and then annexed by the Red Army (1921). He spent the next three years in the Caucasian highlands with a band of fighters, raising what would now be called a guerrilla insurgency out of Khevsureti, Tushetia and Pshavi; the Soviet authorities burned several Khevsuri villages to the ground in 1922 in their attempt to corner him, and he wintered across the border in Chechnya.

In August 1924 a wider uprising broke out across Georgia, organised by the underground Committee for the Independence of Georgia. Cholokashvili came down from the mountains to take command of the largest rebel column in eastern Georgia; on 29 August he raided Manglisi and turned toward Tbilisi, but the Red Army cut him short of the city, and he fell back to attack Dusheti before the uprising collapsed. Soviet retribution in the following weeks killed an estimated seven to ten thousand Georgians, the worst single political bloodletting in modern Georgian history.

Cholokashvili crossed into Turkey in September 1924, moved on to France, and died of tuberculosis at the Plaz-Coutant sanatorium near Passy in Haute-Savoie on 27 June 1930, aged 41. He was buried at the Leuville Cemetery of Georgian émigrés outside Paris, where most of the First Republic's officials and military commanders eventually came to rest. In 2005, in the same season the National Bank ran the design tender for this banknote, Cholokashvili's remains were exhumed at Leuville and reburied with full state honours at the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi, beside Akaki Tsereteli (on the 10 lari) and Ilia Chavchavadze (on the 20 lari).

![Obverse of the 200-lari Georgian banknote, showing a sepia engraved portrait of Kakutsa Cholokashvili in 1920s suit with moustache, the Georgian flag and a circular gold Coat of Arms of Georgia with Saint George above his shoulder, his signature, and "200" denomination markers on a yellow and pink ground; the figure carries the inscription "კ. ჭოლოყაშვილი 1888–1930"](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/6a90de7b99128a50.jpg)

The portrait is taken from a photograph made during his émigré years in France.

*Image: scanned from circulation, public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)) via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ge-money-lari-200.jpg).*

### Reverse: Sukhumi

The reverse shows Sukhumi, the seaside capital of the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic on the Black Sea, as seen from the south end of the bay: palm trees in the foreground, the curving embankment with its nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant terraces, the hill-town behind, and the radio tower on Mount Trapezitsa above. A sandstone relief fragment from Tsebelda, the early medieval fortress complex in the highlands above the city, sits inset at the upper right.

The denomination text appears on this side in three scripts: Georgian (ორასი ლარი, *orasi lari*), Abkhaz Cyrillic (the figure on the central panel below the panorama gives Sukhumi as АқҰа Аҧсны, the Abkhaz name of the city and the country), and English (*Two Hundred Lari*). It is the only Georgian banknote to carry Abkhaz text.

The choice of Sukhumi was political and intentional. The city has been outside Georgian government control since the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993, and the National Bank's announcement of the tender in August 2005 drew an immediate rejection from the de facto Abkhaz authorities. Illarion Argun, then chairman of what Abkhazia calls its own National Bank, told the Tbilisi outlet *Civil.ge*: "It is absolutely unclear why the capital of one country should be depicted on the currency of another country. It is tantamount to the United States depicting Sukhumi or Moscow's Kremlin on its dollar." Abkhaz culture minister Nugzar Logua said only: "Abkhaz painters will not participate in this tender." The National Bank's then-president, Roman Gotsiridze, said on issue day in 2007 that the design was meant as "a symbol of the country's freedom and territorial integrity" and an invitation to Abkhazians and Georgians to rebuild the city together.

![Reverse of the 200-lari Georgian banknote, showing the curving waterfront of Sukhumi with palm trees in the foreground, the long nineteenth-century embankment of white hotels, hills and a radio tower behind, a dark sandstone bas-relief fragment from Tsebelda inset at upper right, against a pale yellow ground, with denomination "200" markers at lower corners and trilingual Georgian-Abkhaz-English denomination text](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/a83f082734cd9b08.jpg)

*Image: scanned from circulation, public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)) via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ge-money-lari-200-rev.jpg).*

### Specifications and design

The 200 lari was issued on 31 March 2007, carries the year "2006" on its face and the signature of National Bank president Roman Gotsiridze. The dominant colours are pale yellow and pink. The National Bank called it "one of the most secured banknotes in the world". The 2007 suite is standard for its date: watermark, intaglio, microprinting, security thread and machine-readable elements, without the holograms and rolling optical variable ink that would arrive with the 2016 refresh.

The design was won by the Georgian painter **Nodar Malazonia** in the international tender of August–September 2005, the first time a Georgian artist had taken a national-currency commission of his own; twelve entries competed, seven Georgian and five from companies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. He received 3,000 lari for the win. **Bacha Malazonia**, his son, who would later design the entire 2016 refresh on his own, joined his father as co-designer between the competition and the issue. The plates and printing were entrusted to Giesecke+Devrient in Munich.

Between Nodar Malazonia's award in September 2005 and the launch in March 2007 the obverse was changed. The original tender brief and the winning sketch had named **Niko Nikoladze** (1843–1928), the engineer and Tergdaleuli journalist who had served alongside Ilia Chavchavadze and Akaki Tsereteli, as the portrait subject; the issued note carries Kakutsa Cholokashvili in his place. The reburial of Cholokashvili from Leuville Cemetery to the Mtatsminda Pantheon took place in the same season as the redesign. The National Bank has not published an account of why the substitution was made.

The 200 lari was deliberately not included in the 2016–2019 upgrade of the lari series. It remains legal tender; circulation has shrunk steadily, and it is the rarest of the working Georgian denominations to see in change.

## 500 lari

### Obverse: David IV the Builder

David IV "the Builder" (*Aghmashenebeli*, 1073–1125) reigned as King of Georgia from 1089 until his death, and reunified the country after a century of Seljuk fragmentation. He came to the throne at sixteen, reorganised the army around a permanent royal guard, restructured the church through the Council of Ruisi-Urbnisi in 1104, and on 12 August 1121 met a Seljuk relief army at Didgori, forty kilometres west of Tbilisi. The Georgian chronicle puts the odds at four to six hundred thousand Seljuks against fewer than sixty thousand Georgians, Cumans, Kipchaks and Frankish crusaders fighting on his side; modern historians put the Seljuk number at perhaps a tenth of that, but the rout was lopsided enough that the Georgian narrators called it the *dzlevai sakvirveli*, the "miraculous victory." A year later, in 1122, David retook Tbilisi from the Muslim emirate that had held it for four centuries, moved the Georgian capital there from Kutaisi, and added to his title "king of the Abkhazians, Kartvelians, Rans, Kakhs and Armenians."

His tax remissions for new arrivals and his hospitality to Sufi poets, Armenian craftsmen and Frankish soldiers made the new Tbilisi a confessionally mixed capital that survived in that form into the 20th century. The Georgian Orthodox Church canonised him after his death; his feast day, 8 February, is a national holiday.

In 1106 David founded the **Gelati Monastery** outside Kutaisi as both the dynastic mausoleum (Tamar, on the 50 lari, is buried there too) and the highest school of the kingdom, with chairs for philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, grammar and rhetoric. On the obverse he is shown in the conventional medieval donor's pose, the small architectural model of the Gelati church in his hands and the church itself behind his right shoulder. David's own grave is at the gate of Gelati, with the request inscribed across the threshold that every visitor step on it: a king's request to be humbled by everyone who entered the school he had built.

![Obverse of the unissued 500-lari Georgian banknote dated 1995, showing a full-length engraved portrait of King David IV the Builder in royal robes and crown, holding a small architectural model of the Gelati Monastery church in his hands and standing in front of the main Gelati church, against a deep green ground with Georgian inscription "დავით აღმაშენებელი" and the serial number AA00004036](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/c5f48f66169bac9c.jpg)

*Image: scanned specimen, public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)) via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:500_lari._Georgia,_1995_a.png).*

### Reverse: the Bolnisi Cross

The reverse reproduces a large carved stone slab from **Bolnisi Sioni**, the three-naved basilica in Kvemo Kartli built between 478 and 493 AD that is the oldest surviving church in Georgia. The medallion at the centre carries the *Bolnisi Cross*, a five-fold equal-armed cross within a circle whose proportions Georgia later adopted, in 2004, as the central motif of the modern Georgian national flag. The four surrounding crosses that complete the flag come from the same 5th-century tradition.

Around the cross runs an inscription in *asomtavruli*, the round-letter Georgian majuscule used in the fifth century. The three Bolnisi inscriptions are the oldest examples of Georgian writing surviving in Georgia itself, second only to the slightly earlier Georgian graffiti at the Bir el-Qutt monastery in Palestine. One of them gives the building date by the regnal year of the Sasanian shahanshah Peroz, the bishop of Bolnisi's name (Davit, like the king on the obverse), and the architect's name (Auxenti).

The lower margin carries the legend "REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA · FIVE HUNDRED LARI." There is no Coat of Arms on the unissued 500: the modern Georgian coat of arms with Saint George was not adopted until 2004, nine years after the note was designed.

![Reverse of the unissued 500-lari Georgian banknote dated 1995, showing a large carved stone slab from the Bolnisi Sioni basilica with a central Bolnisi Cross medallion and surrounding Georgian asomtavruli inscriptions, against a pale green ground, with the denomination 500 at both lower corners and the legend "REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA · FIVE HUNDRED LARI" beneath](https://wikilayer.org/s/images/4077/e9d16982b6b31206.jpg)

*Image: scanned specimen, public domain ([PD-GE-exempt](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-GE-exempt)) via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:500_lari._Georgia,_1995_b.png).*

### An unissued banknote

The 500 lari was designed for the original lari issue that Eduard Shevardnadze's government introduced on 2 October 1995, replacing the kuponi at a rate of one million to one and ending the runaway hyperinflation of 1992–1995. The series was drawn by the Georgian artist **Bacha Malazonia**, who would later design the 2016 upgrade, and printed by **De La Rue** in England. At the introduction exchange rate of about 1.3 lari to the United States dollar, a 500-lari note would have been worth roughly $385, against a Georgian median monthly wage of around $30 in 1995. There was no shop transaction the note made sense for.

The National Bank printed a modest specimen run and held it in the vaults. Some specimens went to museums and numismatic collections, mostly bearing very low serial numbers (the example reproduced here is number 00004036). None entered general circulation. The note has only the 1995 De La Rue intaglio standard (watermark, security thread, microprinting, UV-fluorescent fibres), without the holograms and optical variable ink of the later series.

The National Bank considered re-issuing the note in 2011 and chose against it; the 500 lari was again excluded from the 2016–2019 upgrade. As of today it remains legal tender on paper, worthless in practice, and the only Georgian denomination to have been designed but never put into the public's hands. It is, on the available evidence, the only banknote in the lari series whose place in this wiki rests on what it never became.