1.
Republic of Artsakh
–
Nagorno-Karabakh, officially the Republic of Artsakh, is an unrecognised republic in the South Caucasus. The region is considered by the UN to be part of Azerbaijan, the dispute was largely shelved after the Soviet Union established control over the area and created the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast within the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923. During the fall of the Soviet Union, the region re-emerged as a source of dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in 1991, a referendum held in the NKAO and the neighbouring Shahumian region resulted in a declaration of independence. Large-scale ethnic conflict led to the 1991–1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended with a ceasefire that left the current borders, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is a semi-presidential democracy with a unicameral legislature. Its reliance on Armenia means that in many ways it functions de facto as part of Armenia, the country is very mountainous, averaging 1,097 metres above sea level. The population is predominantly Christian, most being affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church, several historical monasteries are popular with tourists, mostly from the Armenian diaspora, as most travel can take place only between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh is a democracy, whereby the executive power resides with both the President and the Prime Minister. The president is elected for a maximum of two-consecutive five-year terms. The current President is Bako Sahakyan, in the most recent presidential elections, held on 19 July 2012, Sahakyan was reelected to a second term. The President appoints a potential Prime Minister who is approved by a majority vote in the National Assembly. The National Assembly is a unicameral legislature and it has 33 members who are elected for 5-year terms. Three organisations have members in the parliament, the Democratic Party of Artsakh has 18 members, Free Motherland has 8 members, Nagorno-Karabakh is heavily dependent on Armenia, and in many ways de facto functions and is administered as part of Armenia. On 3 November 2006, the then-President of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Arkadi Ghukasyan and it was held on 10 December of the same year and voters overwhelmingly approved the new constitution. According to official results, with a turnout of 87. 2%. The First article of the document describes the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as a sovereign, more than 100 non-governmental international observers and journalists who monitored the poll evaluated it positively, stating that it was held to a high international standard. Secretary General of the Council of Europe Terry Davis asserted that the poll will not be recognized, and is therefore of no consequence. The outcome was also criticised by Turkey, which traditionally supports Azerbaijan because of common ethnic Turkic roots, another referendum was held on 20 February 2017, with a 87. 6% vote in favour on a 76% turnout for instituting a new constitution. The new name implies a claim to the areas controlled beyond the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, the referendum is seen as a response to the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh clashes
2.
Armenian dram
–
The dram is the monetary unit of Armenia. It is subdivided into 100 luma, the word dram translates into English as money and is cognate with the Greek drachma and the Arabic dirham. The first instance of a currency was in the period from 1199 to 1375. On 21 September 1991, a referendum proclaimed Armenia as an independent republic from the Soviet Union. The Central Bank of Armenia, established on 27 March 1993, was given the right of issuing the national currency. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union attempts were made to maintain a common currency among CIS states, however it soon became clear that maintaining a currency union in the unstable political and economical circumstances of the post-Soviet states would be very difficult. The rublezone effectively collapsed with the monetary reform in Russia,1993. As result the states that were still participating were pushed out, Armenia was one of the last countries to do so when it introduced the dram on 22 November 1993. In 1995 the currency sign for the Armenian dram was designed. The Armenian dram sign is the sign of the Armenian dram. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+058F ֏ ARMENIAN DRAM SIGN, after its proclamation of independence, Armenia put into circulation its own national currency – Armenian Dram, the usage of which revealed the necessity for a monetary sign. As the result of business practice and the unique pattern of Armenian letters the shape of the sign. Since that time and until the endorsement of the sign a number of artists. Now the Sign is present in the Armenian standard for the characters and symbols. The Armenian dram is also used in the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, a separate currency, the Nagorno-Karabakh dram, which circulates together with the Armenian dram was introduced during 2005. Coins and banknotes ranging in nominal values from 50 luma to 10 dram were issued, officially the Nagorno-Karabakh dram is legal tender in both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In practice it is mostly sold as souvenirs due to the low nominal values of the coins. In 1994, a first series of coins was introduced in denominations of 10,20 and 50 luma,1,3,5 and 10 dram. In 2003 and 2004, a series consisting of 10,20,50,100,200 and 500 dram coins was introduced to replace the first series
3.
Central bank
–
A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages a states currency, money supply, and interest rates. Central banks also usually oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries, Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally designed to be independent from political interference. Still, limited control by the executive and legislative bodies usually exists, prior to the 17th century most money was commodity money, typically gold or silver. However, promises to pay were widely circulated and accepted as value at least five hundred years earlier in both Europe and Asia. The Song dynasty was the first to issue generally circulating paper currency, in 1455, in an effort to control inflation, the succeeding Ming Dynasty ended the use of paper money and closed much of Chinese trade. The Bank of Amsterdam, established in the Dutch Republic in 1609, is considered to be the forerunner to modern central banks. The Wisselbanks innovations helped lay the foundations for the birth and development of the banking system that now plays a vital role in the worlds economy. Along with a number of local banks, it performed many functions of a central banking system. Lucien Gillard calls it the European guilder, and Adam Smith devotes many pages to explaining how the bank guilder works, the model of the Wisselbank as a state bank was adapted throughout Europe, including the Bank of Sweden and the Bank of England. Established by Dutch-Latvian Johan Palmstruch in 1668, Sveriges Riksbank is often considered by many as the worlds oldest central bank, the lenders would give the government cash and also issue notes against the government bonds, which could be lent again. A Royal Charter was granted on 27 July through the passage of the Tonnage Act 1694, the bank was given exclusive possession of the governments balances, and was the only limited-liability corporation allowed to issue banknotes. The £1. 2M was raised in 12 days, half of this was used to rebuild the Navy and these modern central banking functions evolved slowly through the 18th and 19th centuries. The currency crisis of 1797, caused by panicked depositors withdrawing from the Bank led to the government suspending convertibility of notes into specie payment. The bank was accused by the bullionists of causing the exchange rate to fall from over issuing banknotes. Nevertheless, it was clear that the Bank was being treated as an organ of the state, henry Thornton, a merchant banker and monetary theorist has been described as the father of the modern central bank. An opponent of the real bills doctrine, he was a defender of the bullionist position, thorntons process of monetary expansion anticipated the theories of Knut Wicksell regarding the cumulative process which restates the Quantity Theory in a theoretically coherent form. Until the mid-nineteenth century, commercial banks were able to issue their own banknotes, many consider the origins of the central bank to lie with the passage of the Bank Charter Act of 1844. Under this law, authorisation to issue new banknotes was restricted to the Bank of England, at the same time, the Bank of England was restricted to issue new banknotes only if they were 100% backed by gold or up to £14 million in government debt
4.
Fixed exchange-rate system
–
There are benefits and risks to using a fixed exchange rate. In doing so, the rate between the currency and its peg does not change based on market conditions, the way floating currencies do. A fixed exchange-rate system can also be used as a means to control the behavior of a currency, however, in doing so, the pegged currency is then controlled by its reference value. In other words, a currency is dependent on its reference value to dictate how its current worth is defined at any given time. The central bank provides the assets and/or the foreign currency or currencies which are needed in order to any payments imbalances. In the 21st century, the associated with large economies typically do not fix or peg exchange rates to other currencies. The last large economy to use a fixed exchange system was the Peoples Republic of China which, in July 2005. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism is also used on a basis to establish a final conversion rate against the Euro from the local currencies of countries joining the Eurozone. The gold standard or gold standard of fixed exchange rates prevailed from about 1870 to 1914. The period between the two wars was transitory, with the Bretton Woods system emerging as the new fixed exchange rate regime in the aftermath of World War II. It was formed with an intent to rebuild war-ravaged nations after World War II through a series of currency stabilization programs, the early 1970s saw the breakdown of the system and its replacement by a mixture of fluctuating and fixed exchange rates. Timeline of the exchange rate system, The earliest establishment of a gold standard was in the United Kingdom in 1821 followed by Australia in 1852. Under this system, the value of all currencies was denominated in terms of gold with central banks ready to buy. Each central bank maintained gold reserves as their official reserve asset, for example, during the “classical” gold standard period, the U. S. dollar was defined as 0.048 troy oz. of pure gold. Following the Second World War, the Bretton Woods system replaced gold with the U. S. dollar as the reserve asset. The regime intended to combine binding legal obligations with multilateral decision-making through the International Monetary Fund, the rules of this system were set forth in the articles of agreement of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. S. Dollar and to exchange rates within 1% of parity by intervening in their foreign exchange markets. In December 1971, the Smithsonian Agreement paved the way for the increase in the value of the price of gold from US$35.50 to US$38 an ounce
5.
Armenian language
–
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. Like Hellenic Greek, it has its own branch in the language tree. It is the language of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. It has historically been spoken throughout the Armenian Highlands and today is spoken in the Armenian diaspora. Armenian has its own script, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots. Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages and it is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within that family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups, Armenia was a monolingual country by the 2nd century BC at the latest. Its language has a literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian, and to an extent by Greek, Persian. There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, with which most contemporary dialects are mutually intelligible and he is also credited by some with the creation of the Caucasian Albanian alphabet. In The Anabasis, Xenophon describes many aspects of Armenian village life and he relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. W. M. However, unlike shared innovations, the retention of archaisms is not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development. Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities between the two meant that Iranian and Armenian were the same language. The distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann used the method to distinguish two layers of Iranian loans from the older Armenian vocabulary. Meillets hypothesis became popular in the wake of his Esquisse, eric P. Hamp supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis, anticipating even a time when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian. Nevertheless, as Fortson comments, by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, graeco--Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-third millennium BC
6.
Currency
–
A currency in the most specific use of the word refers to money in any form when in actual use or circulation as a medium of exchange, especially circulating banknotes and coins. A more general definition is that a currency is a system of money in common use, under this definition, US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, and European euros are examples of currency. These various currencies are recognized stores of value and are traded between nations in exchange markets, which determine the relative values of the different currencies. Currencies in this sense are defined by governments, and each type has limited boundaries of acceptance, other definitions of the term currency are discussed in their respective synonymous articles banknote, coin, and money. The latter definition, pertaining to the systems of nations, is the topic of this article. Currencies can be classified into two systems, fiat money and commodity money, depending on what guarantees the value. Some currencies are legal tender in certain jurisdictions, which means they cannot be refused as payment for debt. Others are simply traded for their economic value, digital currency has arisen with the popularity of computers and the Internet. Currency evolved from two basic innovations, both of which had occurred by 2000 BC, originally money was a form of receipt, representing grain stored in temple granaries in Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, then Ancient Egypt. In this first stage of currency, metals were used as symbols to represent value stored in the form of commodities and this formed the basis of trade in the Fertile Crescent for over 1500 years. Trade could only reach as far as the credibility of that military and it is not known what was used as a currency for these exchanges, but it is thought that ox-hide shaped ingots of copper, produced in Cyprus, may have functioned as a currency. It is thought that the increase in piracy and raiding associated with the Bronze Age collapse, possibly produced by the Peoples of the Sea, brought the trading system of oxhide ingots to an end. In Africa, many forms of value store have been used, including beads, ingots, ivory, various forms of weapons, livestock, the manilla currency, the manilla rings of West Africa were one of the currencies used from the 15th century onwards to sell slaves. African currency is still notable for its variety, and in many various forms of barter still apply. These factors led to the metal itself being the store of value, first silver, now we have copper coins and other non-precious metals as coins. Metals were mined, weighed, and stamped into coins and this was to assure the individual taking the coin that he was getting a certain known weight of precious metal. Coins could be counterfeited, but they created a new unit of account. Most major economies using coinage had several tiers of coins, using a mix of copper, silver, gold coins were used for large purchases, payment of the military and backing of state activities, they were more often used as measures of account than physical coins
7.
Gandzasar monastery
–
Gandzasar monastery is a 10th to 13th century Armenian monastery situated in the Mardakert district of de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Gandzasar means treasure mountain or hilltop treasure in Armenian, the monastery holds relics believed to belong to St. John the Baptist and his father St Zechariah. Gandzasar is now the seat of the Archbishop of Artsakh appointed by the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the monastery at Gandzasar was first mentioned in the tenth century. Gandzasar monastery became the headquarters of the Catholicosate of Aghvank, also known as the Holy See of Gandzasar, in the 16th century it became subordinate to the Etchmiadzin catholicosate. Many of its catholicoi were members of the Hasan-Jalal Dawla dynasty, the complex is protected by high walls. Within the complex is the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the drum of its dome has exquisite bas-reliefs that depict the Crucifixion, Adam and Eve, and two ministers holding a model of the church above their heads as an offering to God. The bas-reliefs have been compared to the carvings of Aghtamar. Hovhannavank Monastery Harichavank Monastery Culture of Nagorno-Karabakh Yakobson, Anatoly L, “From the History of Medieval Armenian Architecture, the Monastery of Gandzasar, ” in, Studies in the History of Culture of the Peoples in the East. Gandzasar. com - Gandzasar Monastery, Nagorno Karabakh Republic Program about Gandzasar Monastery by Vem Radio
Artsakh (alongside Armenian dram)
