The Scented Archive: Why Smell Belongs in Our History

We rarely think of scent as part of archives and historical records. The past is treated as visual, textual, factual — something we read or look at. But our lives are full of smells: the minty tang of toothpaste, burnt toast, the brine of sweat on public transportation, the coolness of a florist shop we pass on the way to work. These are not incidental. They are the scaffolding of memory. What we forget with our minds, the nose remembers.

I think often about this partial amnesia. What has been lost because it couldn’t be catalogued? How many women’s lives, marked by the scent of boiled milk, starch, soap, lily of the valley, have slipped away without trace? How many communities vanished, taking with them their voices, customs, foods — and scents. In Ukraine, I witnessed towns being flattened, homes scorched, and with them the quiet archives of everyday life. And elsewhere too, in places like Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, wars and displacements continue to erase not only histories but atmospheres, the very breath of places.

Scent survives in fragments. I’m attuned to such details, and I always jot them down when I work with archives or conduct field research. My background in perfumery has shaped not only how I formulate fragrances, but how I write and remember. In letters I’ve found: please buy me a bottle of Coty Jasmin de Corse. In memoirs: our house smelled like stale chocolate and lavender. In cargo manifests: rose attar, civet, ambergris. In recipe books, oil-stained and half-erased: cook the onions till they smell… wrote my great-grandmother Olena. I couldn’t read the last word, but I guessed she meant “sweet.”

Scent appears too in the ruins of war. In Ukraine, I’ve traced it during my travels and research — in Kharkiv, in Odesa, in the eastern frontier towns. There is the pungent rot of exposed insulation left too long under the elements. The rough odor of rusted metal. Burnt rubber. Burnt books. Some smells I’d rather not recall, but I can’t erase them from memory. They remain, long after the image fades.

Some archives are beginning to recover what scent meant. The Osmothèque in Versailles preserves extinct perfumes like fossils of lost eras. Artists now walk cities creating scent maps. I’ve done this myself, creating olfactory fieldnotes as part of The Rose and the Flame, my current writing project about beauty, memory, and survival. The nose gathers what the camera cannot: burned paper, wet lilac, rain on pavement, freshly baked bread in a city under siege.

To include scent in the archive is to say: the body is a witness. History is not only what we write down, but what we breathe in. It’s the sandalwood paste rubbed into an Indian bride’s skin. The salty sweetness inside a cheese shop in Bologna. The comforting warmth of a bread stand in a Poltava market. The scent of frankincense and cigarettes trailing behind a Bektashi baba in Gjirokastër. The metallic burn of blood and antiseptic in a wartime hospital. The perfume my grandmother wore the day she left for the hospital and never came back.

Scent is unruly. It doesn’t fit neatly in a box. But neither does grief. Or love. Or time.
Still, I follow it — not to trap it, but to remember the past in all of its tragic and glorious detail.

If you could preserve one smell from your life, what would it be?

Photography by Bois de Jasmin, Bereh, Ukraine.