This silver commemorate coin, issued by the Central Bank of Armenia, is dedicated to the 150-th anniversary of Vardges Sureniants’s birth.

Vardges Sureniants (27.02.1860, Akhaltsikha – 06.04.1921, Yalta) is a great Armenian painter. He got preliminary education in Lazaryan seminary followed by study in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and Munich Academy of Arts. In Venice he learned Armenian literature and miniature at Armenian Mekhitarists on St. Lazar.

Sureniants created highly artistic series of thematic compositions depicting Armenian slaughter of the end of the 19-th and beginning of the 20-th centuries. In his paintings he showed the heroic past of the Armenian people, their sufferings and faith. The “Trampled Sanctity” canvas displays Sureniants’s irate complaint against barbarian annihilation of the ancient Armenian culture.

Sureniants is the founder of Armenian genre in painting. “Mkrtich Khrimian”, “Salome”, “Return of Empress Zabel to the Throne” and other paintings deserve their merit in the Armenian applied arts. 

Sureniants is well known also as an Armenian art theorist, theatrical painter, architecture, sculptor and public figure.