Heritage and scent: research and exhibition of Istanbul’s changing smellscapes

Abstract

This paper examines heritage, and particularly intangible heritage, by concentrating on the experience of smell to explore a heritage site in Istanbul, Turkey: the Spice Market. Due to a restoration project, the site became the focus of the 2012 international workshop ‘Urban Cultural Heritage and Creative Practice,’ which aimed at documenting the existing and threatened scents of the marketplace. In 2016 a gallery exhibition, ‘Scent and the City,’ was created as part of an effort to raise awareness about how scent constitutes an important component of the heritage of place. After providing a brief overview of the marketplace’s transformations since its construction in the seventeenth century, this paper covers various methods of scent research, including scent walks, mapping, oral history interviews, and artistic performances, and illustrates how the smellscapes of this historic, and now touristic, quarter of Istanbul are changing. By bringing a sensory approach to this important heritage site in Istanbul we demonstrate how an embodied approach, which forefronts scent as intangible heritage and a primary modality, can serve as a catalyst for individuals and communities to access their memories, emotions, and values and increase awareness of the role scent plays in defining locality.

Keywords:

• Sensory studies
• Istanbul
• smellscapes
• urban
• intangible heritage
• exhibitions

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the workshop participants, the exhibition project team at Koç University’s Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations, and the volunteers who worked in the exhibition. We are grateful to Dr. Nina Ergin and Dr. Ilgım Veryeri Alaca for reading early drafts of the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on our narrative, theories, and arguments.

Notes

1. A note on terminology: English provides numerous olfactory words, including ‘smell,’ ‘scent,’ ‘aroma,’ ‘fragrance,’ and ‘odour.’ They can be used interchangeably as all their definitions refer to the faculty of smelling. There are some differences in connotation, with ‘odour’ tending (but not always) to indicate a negative smell and ‘aroma’ a positive one; ‘fragrance’ nearly always refers to pleasant smells. However, especially in literary and narrative contexts these connotations are often ignored or used for exaggeration of the opposite, such as in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume where he writes of the ‘pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots’ (1991, 3). For purposes of clarity and consistency we use in this article the terms smell and scent, except when quoting or referencing the work of authors who use ‘odour’ or other scent-related terms. ‘Smellscape’ refers to the larger smell environment, including both ‘background’ and ‘episodic smells.’

2. Restoration projects, tourist campaigns, and even governments largely ignore smell. The notable exception is the Japanese government, which has designated 100 sites to be protected for their ‘good fragrance’ and has implemented an urban planning policy for managing scents (Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan [2006]).

3. Interviews were conducted both as part of the Smellscapes of Eminönü Oral History Project and the ‘Scent and the City’ exhibition visitor surveys. The oral history recordings will be accessible in the Koç University Oral History, Sound and Memory Archive, while the exhibition survey data will be available in Davis, forthcoming.

4. For example, even though the number of linden trees in Istanbul has decreased during the past few decades, people still associate spring with their smell and mourn this loss. This sense of loss and longing for a particular scent which is gradually disappearing due to the building boom of contemporary Istanbul extends beyond the Spice Market merchants and our interviewees; in 2012 the Ministry of Forest and Water Affairs began planting 100,000 linden trees in the industrial neighbourhood of Pendik, which, while on the outskirts of Istanbul, is intended to ‘wrap’ Istanbul in the smell of linden (Turkish Republic Ministry of Forest and Water Affairs 2012).

5. Whether this particular change is missed is debatable; many people are quite glad that the leather-making factories and other production centres have moved out of the city.

6. The oral history project and exhibition survey generated different types of sensory data and the research for these projects was conducted in different environments; both fall under the scope of the broader topic – memory and scents in Istanbul.

7. For a more detailed view of the exhibition design and scent machines, see the video ‘SERGİ: Koku ve Şehir | EXHIBITION: Scent and the City’ by ANAMED (2016) on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keF98UvuaGc