Colleague Gülden Aydın passes away after brave fight against cancer

ISTANBUL

Gülden Aydın, the most senior reporter of Hürriyet’s special reports desk, died at the age of 61 on March 19, following a tough fight against cancer.

Aydın, who suffered from pancreatic cancer for one and a half years, had reported from all over Turkey and conflicted areas in the region, making a deserved name for her enthusiasm for reporting, strong stance against domestic violence and bravery.

“I would not exchange the lust of discovering the truth to anything,” she told Hürriyet’s Ayşe Arman in January last year, in a broad interview on her career.

She told Arman that the most dangerous moment for her was when she attempted to open da deep freezer at an ISIL tunnel in Iraq in 2017, which was trapped with a bomb by the fleeing militants of the terrorist group, to see if there was a body inside it.

“I was opening it and an Iraqi bomb expert grabbed me on my wrist. We would shattered into molecules if he weren’t that quick,” she said.

Gülden was born in the Divriği district in the Central Anatolian province of Sivas in 1958.

The Faculty of Letters graduate worked as a Turkish Language and Literature teacher for a short time before she began her journalism career at the 2000’e Doğru news magazine in 1988.

She also worked at Hürriyet newspaper and Aktüel magazine.

Aydın took over the helm as the news editor of Akşam newspaper in 2002, before she returned to Hürriyet in 2004.

Aydın has achieved several journalism awards and unveiled numbers of scandals, including the rape of seven minors at a primary school in the southeastern province of Siirt, which resulted in trial of nearly 100 men.

She is the author of “Yeryüzü Yanılgısı,” a poetry book that roughly translates as “The Earth Dellusion.”

Our colleague will be laid to rest on March 20 after a ceremony at the Turkish Journalists’ Association (TGC) headquarters in the Cağaloğlu neighborhood and a funeral at Beşiktaş Cemevi at noon.