Halet Çambel (1916-2014) was a Turkish archaeologist and Olympic fencer. She was the first Muslim woman to compete in the Olympic Games.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s olympian was the rallying symbol that Turkey needed after the occupation and fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Her participation in the 1936 Olympics signaled the birth of a new, more democratic nation. She stood up for what she believed in no matter how big or small the stage. Meet Halet Cambel!
Halet Cambel was born on August 27, 1916, in Berlin, Germany. She came from a well connected, politically inclined family. Her father, Hasan Cemil Cambel, was a Turkish military attaché, and a close friend of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Halet’s maternal grandfather was the Turkish ambassador to Germany.
Due to Halet’s father’s job, the family was barred from the country while it was occupied during World War I.
It wasn’t until 1923 when the country was declared a republic, that the family was able to return. Although just 8 years old at the time, Halet recalled being surprised by the conservatism of the Muslim women clad in long black garments covering most of their bodies and faces. This was not something she saw in her early years living in Berlin.
For high school, Halet attended the American Robert College of Istanbul. It was there that she discovered her love of history and art, as well as her love of fencing. Her history of art teacher frequently organized field trips to historic sites in Istanbul that amazed Halet. These visits had a lasting effect on her desire to explore and better understand the world.
Halet also began to exercise in high school. Back in Germany, she had suffered from typhoid and hepatitis. In an effort to preserve her health, Halet’s family sent her to school dressed in lots of heavy, layered clothing. Halet had a different strategy in mind. Once she got to school, she would remove the majority of her layers and turned to exercise, instead.
Halet’s choice of sport diverged from the norm. While many chose folk dancing, Halet was drawn to fencing. Halet’s interest in the sport grew from stories of knights in German books she frequently read. Halet took fencing seriously and trained regularly with her Russian coach named Mr. Nadolsky.
In 1933, Halet enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris to study archaeology. But in 1936, when she was 20 years old, she got the opportunity to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Halet was the first Turkish woman and first Muslim woman to participate in the Olympics.
These 1936 Olympics were of great significance. For Hitler, they were a stage on which he would present his ideology and flex Germany’s dominance. And for Turkey, they were a chance for the young republic to showcase its revitalization after the fall of the Ottoman empire.
Halet had not spent not spend years solely preparing for this moment. Rather, she had trained in her spare time.
When she arrived at training camp, she was assigned a very strict and abrasive Hungarian trainer who taught techniques Halet was unfamiliar with. This in turn caused Halet to question and lose her old, effective techniques without enough time to really master the new ones.
Halet came up short in the individual foil fencing event. Still, she was a trailblazer for generations of young Turkish athletes.
Her shining moment came at the conclusion of the Games when a German official asked her to introduce herself to Hitler. Halet rejected the request. Later in life, Halet recalled the experience and said, “We actually would not have come to Germany at all if it were down to us, as we did not approve of Hitler’s regime.”
This public rejection, alongside Jesse Owens’s historic win in the 100-meter dash, angered Hitler and threatened his agenda of presenting as an accepted world superpower.
After the Olympics, Halet went back to studying archeology in Paris. While at school, she began dating a man named Nail Cakirhan. When they met, he was a Communist poet and journalist. He later became a distinguished architect. Despite Halet’s family’s disapproval of Nail and his ideals, the two secretly married in 1938 and stayed married until he died in 2008.
In 1940, the couple moved back to Istanbul and Halet became a scientific assistant at Istanbul University. She received her doctorate in 1944 and a few years later became a lecturer at the University.
During this time, Halet began studying with German archaeologist, Helmuth Bossert. Halet and Helmuth took multiple trips on horseback to excavation sites. In 1947, they traveled into the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey to find the Hittite settlement of Karatepe. They discovered the 8th-century Hittite fortress city and also unearthed Hittite hieroglyphics that they were able to decipher after finding a tablet with the Phoenician alphabet. Over the subsequent 50 years of her career, Halet would frequently return to the site to gain a deeper understanding of Hittite writing and culture.
Halet was a vocal advocate for social and environmental issues. In the 1950s, the Turkish government wanted to remove the artifacts from Karatepe and place them in a museum. Halet fought their efforts and in 1957, she convinced the government to build an outdoor museum at the site so that none of the pieces would be damaged. Later, Halet worked with the government to ensure a new dam at the Ceyhan River would not flood or destroy historic archaeological sites. She also pushed for Turkish mountain dwellers to switch from grazing goats to sheep after she noticed that the goats were destroying the surrounding pine forests.
On January 12, 2014, Halet died at age 97 in Istanbul.
She paved the way and inspired young Turkish researchers and athletes. In 2012, Turkey sent 66 women, more than half the team, to the Olympics.
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