Celebrating Jale İnan

Google Dooles 27.09.2022 07:45  Date: September 27, 2022 Today’s Doodle celebrates Dr. Jale İnan, the first female Turkish archaeologist. She famously located the missing half of the Farnese Hercules statue at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and worked with the government to return the statue to Turkey. The return of the statue was successfully concluded on this day in 2011. İnan was born in Istanbul in 1914. Her father, the director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, was one of Turkey’s first archeologists. He inspired her interest in the ancient world. In the 1930s, she won scholarships to study archeology at the universities of Berlin and Munich. Unfortunately for İnan, World War II began shortly after her arrival in Germany. Despite the war around her, she never lost focus on her studies. She stayed through the war and finished her thesis, “Examination of Art History in Sacrifice Rituals on Roman Coins,” from a bunker in 1943. After she completed her PhD, she returned to Turkey and became an assistant to the Chair of Ancient History and Numismatics at University of Istanbul. During this time, she joined an excavation at Perga, an ancient Greek city in Anatolia where she helped unearth one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: The Temple of Artemis. İnan went on to lead the restoration of several significant ancient cultural sites, such as the Temple of Apollo in Side. Over the course of her prolific career, she uncovered so many artifacts that the Antalya Museum had to undergo expansion not once, but twice, to make space for the relics. Each year, the Antalya Women's Museum bestows the Dr. Jale İnan Award to a remarkable Turkish woman carrying on her legacy. Location: , , , , Tags: