Europe Stinks

January 15, 2023 11:50 AM

Odeuropa, a project to collect and map Europe's "olfactory heritage," has been building knowledge about Europe's historic fragrances and stenches. Check out the Smell Explorer, follow a BBC reporter in a tour of the "smells and stinks of Amsterdam," or sniff the smells of Hell through art.
posted by Miko (22 comments total)

And in the state of Denmark, things are how?
posted by y2karl at 12:25 PM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

I believe Prince Hamlet is feeling... out of sorts. Not sure how he smells though.
posted by Splunge at 1:49 PM on January 15, 2023

Leyden: "the cleanest city I ever saw..."

-Abigail Adams.
posted by clavdivs at 2:15 PM on January 15, 2023

Off topic really but this suggestion might turn out to be helpful people affected by this incurable ailment. I wish someone would start a good thread on anosmia, which prior to COVID was relatively unknown to the public at least in the USA. I has a severe neurosis and melancholy (I really don't like the clinical word depression) from 2013-2015 that completely obliterated my sense of smell and taste. A great therapist and poet genius worked with my dreams for two years. My sense of smell and taste returned! He noted several times during my analysis that he strongly believed that my big fat neurosis was causing the lack of these two precious senses. He was right. I felt reborn and so relieved. Then in December 2019 I had a sharp pain in my ear and I am now anosmic again. If one loves to cook and eat and drink wine, it is devastating. One can never adapt to such a a condition, one can only endure it.
posted by DJZouke at 2:22 PM on January 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's amazing how much more real a location seems in a movie or on TV when I have a smell memory to go with it. The river in London! The steam grates in New York City! The hot pavement of Los Angeles!

When I worked in an art museum, one of the educators there told me about her former job creating scent profiles to go with museum exhibitions, so people would have an appropriate smell in their minds for what they were seeing. It reminded me of Disney's "smellitizers" that allow you to smell Rome burning on Spaceship Earth or the orange groves in Soarin' over California.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:17 PM on January 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

When I was doing installation art in the 80s, I would often include an olfactory element. For example, one installation involved something like a sickbed/deathbed with 100-year old medicinal bottles/boxes. The exposed lath work--in an old art gallery basement--painted red. Sound: four wall-mounted record players with phono needles scratching over crab shells (from Maine). There were other visual elements. For smell, miscellaneous liquids found under the kitchen sink, with food, mostly neutralized by the chemicals so it wouldn't smell too putrid, but still contributing to the room's olfactory ambience. Hidden under the stairs.

One art critic called it the best installation of the year in Denver. Yeah, a cowtown, but also I can brag because it was so long ago.

BTW, I didn't even conceive of it being a sickbed/deathbed until the art critic pointed out the obvious. I worked in a Surrealist vein, not thinking overmuch.
posted by kozad at 3:24 PM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

As anyone in Denver knows, if you can smell the Greeley stockyards, a big storm is on its way. And, that stockyard odor is the smell of money.
posted by jazon at 4:13 PM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

By Jove my comment was:
America smells like weed, plastic pot holes and wet money.
posted by clavdivs at 7:30 PM on January 15, 2023

I say, Prince Hamlet has no nose!

Well, how does he smell?

Terrible!
posted by credulous at 10:16 PM on January 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Spoiler alert: urine
posted by Perko at 11:12 PM on January 15, 2023

Poo. Can find no mention of Yorvik, the Viking experience in England. They have been puffing appropriate pongs at a willing public for +30 years.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:49 AM on January 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I invite you to google "Perfume Museum". I had thought that the Osmothèque at Versailles was unique, but clearly I was mistakne.
posted by BWA at 5:03 AM on January 16, 2023

There is a viennese district which smells of chocolate, since 120 years, because various chocolate based wafers, biscuits and sweets are produced there, at the Manner factory. Sounds nice but can be overpowering and too much.
And the adjacent district smells of beer production, not quite as nice, often unpleasantly so, as Ottakringer Beer is produced there on an industrial scale. Ottakringer is not a special craft beer but the kind bought by the tray in cans, for cheap drinking.
posted by 15L06 at 6:36 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

And, that stockyard odor is the smell of money.

Never gonna forget the smell of Texas at midnight. We were driving on the highway straight through back from Colorado -- on the way towards it we'd been in a fierce rain, which was probably why we didn't smell it that time. It was dark enough to see the Milky Way, so I couldn't see a herd or a plant or anything out there on the prairie. I could just smell it: cows, cows, cows. Not a bad smell, exactly, if you like the country, and certainly better than the paper mill smell you get in Mississippi (easily mistaken for a skunk or paternal flatulence). Still, it was mighty strong and a bit unsettling to have it come out of nowhere.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 AM on January 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Can find no mention of Yorvik, the Viking experience in England.

This is what I immediately thought of. The highlight of York when I was a kid. (Also, it has a/c, an important fact in some of those mid-90s summers.)

Sounds nice but can be overpowering and too much.

I've always found the smell of the Blommer Chocolate factory in Chicago icky.
posted by hoyland at 8:39 AM on January 16, 2023

Very, very few smells, for initial shock and a back endlessness of overpowering awful, can compare to a sugar beet mill. Paper mills aren’t even in it.

I’ll never forget driving down a road in southern Colorado, seeing a sign saying "entering Manassa" and being smashed in the face by that sickening stench.

I remember thinking that it was no wonder Jack Dempsey had the will and sheer primordial rage to become heavyweight champ if this is what he was escaping from! I just Googled it and found a page saying he worked a "sugar beet loader" starting at age seven.
posted by jamjam at 9:52 AM on January 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

And now I find there's compelling evidence that sugar beets have a gene to make geosmin, which is often said to be the chemical humans can smell at the lowest concentration, and that the authors of the first linked article seem to be saying had not previously been shown to be produced by a plant instead of a microorganism.
posted by jamjam at 10:20 AM on January 16, 2023

I used to live right around the corner from a frozen vegetable processing plant, and you could always tell what was in season by the smell. Rutabaga season you could smell across town.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:35 AM on January 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of systems like Smell-O-Vision.

Later, instead of machines, they used scratch-and-sniff cards--they even had it available for some showings of the Spy Kids 4D movie. John Waters did it with gross smells for his movie Polyester.

The technology is even being developed for virtual reality. If it catches on they can do an online version of this museum.
posted by eye of newt at 1:11 AM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I used to live right around the corner from a frozen vegetable processing plant, and you could always tell what was in season by the smell.

Heh. I worked in one for couple of years. The morning I showed up at the plant after the wastewater settling pond had gone into some state of anaerobic putrefaction overnight was a next-level olfactory experience that still haunts me.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:31 AM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

That’s fascinating, mandolin conspiracy.

I have a feeling the pond 'overturned' because the anaerobic layer underneath became less dense from gas generation or metabolic heat, or the overlying layer became more dense because of a temperature drop — or a combination of both.

I also believe that California couple and their kid and their dog who were found dead without a mark on any of them when they didn’t come home from a hike near the outer edge of Yosemite nat'l park some years ago probably died from cyanide poisoning when a mine tailings pond overturned after a then record drought, but that wasn’t the official verdict.
posted by jamjam at 8:54 PM on January 18, 2023

I remember one time just after starting college in Seattle in 1967 when my brother and I visited my mom back in Kansas. We went for a ride out in the country to vist some great-aunts when along the way we were all of a sudden immersed in the reek of marijuana smoke. It was thick -- like Woodstock on steroids. My brother and I turned and gaped at each other in disbelief while my mom said "Oh my -- it smells like they're burning the alfalfa!" That was when I found out burning hay fields is a thing.
posted by y2karl at 12:05 PM on January 21, 2023