The Human Rights Monument — a sculpture depicting a woman reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — is a well-known hallmark in a bustling pedestrian area in the heart of Ankara. Over the past month, a second fixture has appeared on the site: a woman with a banner. Despite 17 detentions, often by heavy-handed police, Nuriye Gulmen — one of hundreds of academics suspended from office after the July 15 attempted coup — keeps returning to the site to demand her job back.

Her solo protest since Nov. 9 has made Gulmen a symbolic figure in Turkey’s state of emergency since the putsch, which has seen a ferocious crackdown on followers of Fethullah Gulen — the accused mastermind of the coup — and other government opponents. At a time when street demonstrations have become rare and are quickly clamped down by police, the young woman has stood out with unbending courage and will.

Al-Monitor went to the Human Rights Monument several times to speak to Gulmen, witnessing her detention each time. A few days ago, however, social media users reported an “extraordinary” development. “Nuriye Gulmen was not taken into custody today,” they said, prompting this reporter to rush to the monument again. Gulmen was there, asking passersby to sign a petition calling on authorities to give her back her job at Selcuk University in Konya, some 260 kilometers (161 miles) south of Ankara.

Gulmen studied comparative literature, and after obtaining a post-graduate degree, she embarked on an academic career. Because of her dissident attitude, administrative probes became part of her life, she told Al-Monitor. “I was working under a constant threat of expulsion. They would even write a [disciplinary] report on the grounds I was singing in the corridors,” she said. In 2015, the university refused to renew Gulmen’s contract, but she was back to work on Sept. 30 after winning a court case against her employers.