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.