Halet Çambel

Halet Çambel (27 August 1916 – 12 January 2014) was a Turkish archaeologist and Olympic fencer. She was the first woman with a Muslim background to compete in the Olympic Games.^[1]

Private life

Çambel was born in

She completed her secondary education at Arnavutköy American High School for Girls (today Robert College). During the high school years, she was inspired by her history of art teacher, who organized visits to historic sites of Istanbul. It was at this time that she began to perform fencing. Between 1933 and 1939, she was educated in archaeology at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Çambel became a scientific assistant at Istanbul University in 1940. In 1944, she received a doctorate. From 1947 on, Çambel served as lecturer.^[3] She was a visiting scholar for two years at University of Saarbrücken in Germany.^[2] In 1960, she was appointed professor and founded the Institute of Prehistory. She became emeritus in 1984.^[4]

On returning to Istanbul after the 1936 Summer Olympics, where she represented her country, she started a relationship with Nail Çakırhan, a communist poet and journalist, who became a celebrated architect.^[2] They were married for seventy years until the death of Nail Çakırhan in October 2008.

Çambel died at age 97 in Istanbul on 12 January 2014.

She competed in the women's individual foil event at the 1936 Summer Olympics.^[6] Çambel was the first Muslim woman to compete in the Olympics.^[7] Although invited by a "female German official" to meet Adolf Hitler, Çambel refused it on political grounds.^[8][2]

Professional career

After

Çambel was also active in promoting the preservation of Turkey's cultural heritage. In the 1950s, she resisted the government's attempt to move the artifacts from Karatepe to a museum. The government eventually agreed, and in 1960 established an outdoor museum, the Karatepe-Aslantaş Open-Air Museum, where her husband Nail Çakırhan designed some buildings. She also fought efforts to dam the Ceyhan River, which would have flooded many archaeological sites. She was able to have the proposed water level reduced sufficiently to save the sites.^[3]

Çambel was elected to the

Çambel was celebrated in an exhibition Cumhuriyet Kadınları Sahneye Çıkıyor: Cevval, Akılcı, Dirençli, Sabırlı ve İnançlı, (Republican Women Take to the Stage: Brave, Rational, Resistant, Patient and Faithful) organised at Goethe-Institut Ankara from 5 December 2023 to 4 February 2024 in honour of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey and the 90th anniversary of Turkish women gaining the right to vote. It showcased the lives and careers of six women who were educated in the young Turkish Republic and the Weimar Republic and whose careers made an impact on the world. Alonside Çambel, the exhibition featured computer scientist Marianne Laqueur, architect Mualla Eyüboğlu Anhegger, Semiha Berksoy, Turkey's first Muslim opera singer, paediatrician Erna Eckstein Schlossmann and architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.^[11][12][13]

References