The archaeologist Halet Çambel was one of those people whose life seems to have been designed to make the rest of us feel inadequate. One of the first women fencers to take part in the Olympic Games, she also married Nial Çakirhan, a self-taught architect who won an Aga Khan award for designing modern wooden houses in a traditional style in Gökova and Dalyan. She was the driving force behind the excavation of the Hittite site of Karatepe-Aslantaş, near Osmaniye.