Kasym Tynystanov

Kasym Tynystanov was born in the village of Chyrpykty in the Issyk-Kul area, studied in Tashkent and helped create the first Kyrgyz newspapers and textbooks.

He wrote the first grammars of Kyrgyz and laid the foundations of the Latin-script Kyrgyz writing used from 1927 to 1940. He was a delegate to the First Turkological Congress in Baku in 1926, and his poems are among the earliest written Kyrgyz verse.

In 1938 he was shot as an "enemy of the people" and buried at Chong-Tash, today's Ata-Beyit memorial. His portrait is on the 10-som note.