"In terms of jewelry art, the Gold Koran has no analogs in the world. It is made of 0.3 mm-thick material, and the letters are three times higher," Nazif Mirikhanov, a Tatarstan envoy to Moscow, who took part in the ceremony, told Interfax.

It is planned to make ten copies of the Gold Koran, two of which will remain in Russia. "One should be gi

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ven to the president of Russia and the other to the Kazan Kremlin. The other eight will be offered for sale to Islamic countries and their national museums," Vladimir Prusakov, the general director of the company WT, under a contract with which the copy of the Gold Koran was made, told Interfax.

The full version of the Gold Koran should soon be exhibited in Saudi Arabia, Prusakov said. "The issue is currently being cleared with the Kingdom's authorities," he said.

The Gold Koran includes 162 pages, each of them made of pure gold.

The Gold Koran was first exhibited at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in June 2007. Several gold pages were also shown at the 15th international exhibition The Holy Koran in Iran and at the Bahrain forum Dialogue of Civilizations.

The Gold Koran is a copy of the handwritten Usman Koran dating back to the 8th century, which used to be part of a private collection in Russia. Since 1936, the original of the oldest handwritten copy of the Koran, which has become the Russian state's property, has been kept at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Oriental Studies Institute in St. Petersburg.

MOSCOW. Feb 27 (Interfax)