Name: Halet Çambel

Born: 27th August 1916

Death: 12th January 2014

Country of Origin: Turkey and Germany

In a nutshell: The history-loving Halet Çambel is one of Turkey’s best-loved archaeologists for her strive to preserve the country’s key archaeological sites. She was also the first Muslim to compete in the Olympic Games in 1936. Oh, and she snubbed Hitler while she was there, she really couldn’t be more iconic. 

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Not every trailblazer knows they’re on the right side of history when they’re living through it but I like to think Halet Çambel knew exactly that when she famously turned down a meeting with Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games. But, let’s back up a bit. 

Halet was born in Berlin to Hasan Cemil Çambel and Remziye Hanım in 1916. Her father had links to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the much revered and highly respected first president of Turkey. One of the many key social reforms Atatürk championed was women’s suffrage and he granted women the vote during his presidency. Halet returned to Istanbul to study and fell in love with history. She decided to study archaeology at university in France and took up fencing after reading books about knights. 

It was her skills in fencing and the new freedoms granted to women in Turkey that allowed Halet to journey back to Germany for the 1936 Olympic Games where she became the first Muslim woman to compete in the Games. 

By this time in history, the Nazi party was in power in Germany and though the worst was yet to come from the Nazi regime, snippets of what lied ahead were already starting to show. For example, this was the Games were Jesse Owens, one of the greatest athletes of all time, won four gold medals yet was denied a hand shake from Hitler due to his black skin. 

So, when Halet and fellow fencer, Suat Fetgeri Aseni Tarı, were invited to introduce themselves to Hitler, they both refused on political grounds. Halet later said she wouldn’t even have gone to compete in the first place if the Turkish government hadn’t asked her to.

However, it’s not just her sporting career and snubbing one of history’s most horrific individuals that makes her name hit the history books. She was also a vocal advocate for preserving Turkey’s history and archaeology sites. She worked on Karatepe, a Hittites fortress, alongside German archaeologist Helmuth Theodor Bossert. The Hittites were Anatolian people who built an empire all the way back in the second millennium BCE. In her role, she took part in deciphering Hittite hieroglyphics. 

That’s not all though. She also campaigned for the artefacts of the site to remain in place and for the site to be established as an open air museum. She fought for the preservation of archeological sites in Turkey by the Ceyhan River and came to be one of Turkey’s top archaeologists. 

Halet married poet, journalist and architect, Nail Çakırhan, and they stayed by each others’ side for 70 years until Çakırhan’s death in 2008. Halet herself died just a few years later in 2014.