Ottoman History Podcast - Istanbul and the Ottoman Olfactory Heritage

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Episode 363 with Lauren Davis hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What did Istanbul's Spice Bazaar smell like in Ottoman times? In this episode, we explore the historical smellscape of this iconic market space from its early history up to the present day. Through a story about Ottoman smells and their transformations in the twentieth century, we touch on the trade routes of exotic spices, Ottoman marketing practices, and the greener, more fragrant Istanbul that still lives in the memories of twentieth-century shopowners who spent their lives in and around the Bazaar. Finally, we consider how telling history through smell could change the way we think about the past and struggle to preserve it. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. Today's conversation will take us to a new realm of Ottoman history that we haven't dealt with very much on the podcast before, which is the history of Istanbul's smells. So anyone I think who has lived in or visited Istanbul will know that like many big cities, Istanbul is a city of many smells. But today we're going to talk a little bit about what Istanbul would or might have smelled

like in Ottoman times, focusing on the very odiferous quarter of Istanbul's spice bazaar or Mr. Tarshisa. So I'm very happy to welcome to the podcast today Dr. Lauren Davis, who received her PhD from Istanbul's Coach University in 2017, and was also the curator of a 2016 exhibition on scent in the city that went up in Istanbul and then in Ankara. So Dr. Davis, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So let's start out just by asking a little bit about the history of the Spice Bazaar in Ottoman times. And when did this space start to be used for buying and selling of spices and other things? Well, truthfully,

to consider the Ottoman Spice Bazaar, we have to go back much further, because that location has always been a port and a place for traders to come in and sell their goods. So during the Byzantine era, we know that that's where the Rossovo market stands. In fact, we have some documents sort of regulating the location of spice sellers to that region because they wanted the smells of the spices to waft up to where the palaces were. So that neighborhood has always been a sort of a hub of trade and commerce. The spice market itself was built in the late 17th century, though it had been, there had been an earlier building project on that site that failed and then it was taken up later. And we should also say that the site itself is at one of, is positioned kind of at the end of the Galata Bridge in the Eminönü

neighborhood of Istanbul. Yes, exactly. It's right on the goal. It's right at the end of the Galata Bridge in the Eminonu neighborhood of Istanbul. Yes, exactly. It's right on the goal. It's right at the start of the Golden Horn. So it's very easy for ships to come in there. And that's where the customs houses were. It was sort of like everything happened. You came in, you dealt with your taxes, any sort of import fees that had to happen. And then you could go and you could sell your goods or you can move them on to other places in the empire or on to Europe. And that's one of the interesting things. It wasn't just a hub for the domestic market. It was a hub for the international market.

And there were traders from Venice and Genoa and later the Dutch and the English, and everybody was there. It's a bit tricky at times because we say the spice market, and we have this very concrete idea of what a spice is and therefore what must have been there but the fact is is that the goods that were in the market changed a lot over the years we know that especially after the Portuguese you know discovered the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope that things changed in how goods were passing

from the East Indies all the way to Europe. That changed as well. So there were times when maybe there was a lot of musk coming to Istanbul, and then there were a few decades where it wasn't coming all that often. It used to be that pepper flowed through Istanbul, but later we have records showing that pepper went straight to Europe and then came back to the Ottoman Empire, to Istanbul and to Izmir. So it was really a volatile changing place, especially in terms of smell.

The one thing I can add to that is that spice included not just spices like pepper or cinnamon, included aromatic resins and other things that were used in incense, such as musk and frankincense and myrrh and ambergris, things that we don't necessarily associate as spices today. It also probably did not include fresh herbs and things that maybe we would categorize as spice. So I really love this picture where you have, you know, people are so eager to unload these goods from their boats, in part because their commodity value is contained in their smelliness. I mean, the fact that the smell can waft up is actually very important. So maybe we could just talk a little bit about how would we periodize the history of smell in the spice market?

Like what were the big smells? How did they change over time? So that's really difficult to answer, mostly because the research hasn't been done yet. There is sort of a baseline of smells that are very important to Islam. And there's a baseline of smells that came from the Arabian Peninsula and that were grown within the lands of the Ottoman Empire that we can say were pretty much there all the time and didn't change so much. Things like rose water, for example, musk, again, very important for perfuming mosques and being part of incense.

Domestic, which is only grown in the small islands in between Greece and Turkey. So we know that those things were there. But the more exotic spices, it's really difficult to know without a really in-depth study of port records, when they were there, when they weren't there, and why certain things became really entrenched into the markets and into the cuisine because when you talk about smells and you talk about spices you also of course need to talk about the cuisine so for example cinnamon seemed to be a pretty continuous presence and got incorporated into Ottoman dishes and it's still a presence in Turkish cuisine today. But vanilla is not so

popular here. And so why one but not the other? Did that mean that vanilla never passed through the spice market? Absolutely not. It was surely there, and it was tested and tried, but for some reason didn't hold on like other exotic spices did. So I think at this moment, we can't yet periodize the smells. So this is a rich arena for our listeners who may be looking for a new project that would take them to the ever fascinating trove of port records. Absolutely. And there's been a little bit on Izmir, but not so much on Istanbul. I think there's a lot you could do there. And again, it's also there's this whole area unknown area of all the roots that the spices took to get from one end of the world to the other in essence and so we we think about Istanbul but there's also Izmir

and there's also Damascus and Aleppo and all of these other stops that were part of the Empire that also had these very rich trading cultures and places of commodities where commodities were sold that are also very much an important part of the olfactory heritage even if they're not part of of the actual building or the area say at the spice bazaar very interesting and hopefully we can come back a little later in the podcast to thinking about what kinds of imaginaries or maps we might construct if we were working with smell rather than with other kinds of sources. So maybe we could then just turn to the 20th century or to the late 19th and the early 20th century up to the present and talk a little bit about, I mean, part of your research was also to do oral histories with people who've

been working in the Spice Bazaar. What has happened to the Spice Bazaar, say, since the late 19th century? How has the smellscape, if I may, changed over that time? So much has happened in the past century and a half, let's say. Istanbul in general, the population has just boomed, more tourists are coming. And as that has happened over decades, there have been various renovations and campaigns to clean the areas, not just the market itself in that neighborhood, but also the water around it. There was a really famous cleaning campaign of the Golden Horn in the early 90s. I did not witness the smell before then, but the people I talked to, everybody mentioned how horrible the Golden Horn smelled before the 1990s and so especially during the Republican era

there was really a push to clean up the city in various ways but also to make it more modern and more efficient and so when we talk about the spice market we keep talking about it like it's an isolated L-shaped building, which it is. But it wasn't always. It was part of a much larger complex associated with the new mosque, the Yeni Jami, and other smaller buildings around there.

But as part of the cleaning campaigns, they also put a road in between the two, very much separating them. And there's lots of things that are perhaps unofficial, but that we can guess at, that there were smaller sort of sellers that maybe just had little shacks outside the market that were pushed out, gradually came back. And then this cleaning process happened several times over.

Most recently, just a few years ago, one of the James Bond films was set in Istanbul, and it was filmed right beside the spice market. So in between the spice market and the new mosque, there was an animal market and some little tea gardens, little tea houses and places for people to sit, and they cleared all of that out and just put gardens in and they actually set up a fake bazaar right beside the actual bazaar. And then from then, they've continued to do renovations on the bazaar itself

to make it a number of things, to make it more earthquake-proof, to clean it. But it's also resulted in the closure of Pandeli, which was the restaurant that was right at the start of the bazaar. And that, combined with the decreasing number of tourists in the past few years, has really affected the atmosphere of the Spice Bazaar. There was also at one point another force of the possibility that Turkey would join the EU, needing to match EU standards for health and safety. So for a while, spices were all covered with plastic containers

to try to follow these regulations in some way. As it seemed like Turkey would not become part of the EU, that changed again. So this is really interesting because what it shows us is that the things that you would smell in the spice Bazaar on any given day were completely wrapped up, as I've never thought about, but might now seem reasonable. We're completely wrapped up in contemporary politics and in the kind of urban renewal and what is considered hygienic, what is considered organized that's been going on in the city more broadly over the last century and a half, roughly. Absolutely. And that's not even considering the politics around public space and what should be in public space. In my oral history project, a lot of people referenced the decreasing amount of green space and trees and flowers around the bazaar and in other areas of Istanbul, which, you know, in spring days like this, we know very clearly contributes to the smells and the smellscapes of a place.

And it's hard to know perhaps how future projects will attempt to deal with some of these questions. So that's one of the reasons that I worked on this project was to bring just a greater awareness to the fact that the smellscape is changing. It's something we need to think about and make part of our dialogue. Yeah, absolutely. So let's maybe just think a little bit more too about what are the smells that have been lost? I mean, what are the smells that people remembered or that you can surmise from your research that used to be present in this space that no longer are? from your research that used to be present in this space that no longer are? Well, there's a few categories. One thing is that these aromatic resins like frankincense and aromatic goods that aren't spices like ambergris and musk. Ambergris and musk are now heavily

regulated because they're animal byproducts, but they're almost impossible to find in the market, completely impossible, really. The products that came out of them, the Ottomans had a number of really sort of fascinating recipes for different creams and incense and incense water, which is a particularly interesting recipe that combined musk and it combined flowers and different woods and rose water. So we know we have records of the spice market merchants making these different concoctions. And that's something you can no longer find. You can still find many basic spices there. But the rich olfactory heritage and imagination and creativity of the Ottomans is no longer

there. And what about in the lifetime of people like perhaps older people who are are still alive and who are working in the Spice Bazaar what are the things that they remember that have been lost? Would the disappearance of Ambergris and Musk would that if this have happened in their lifetime or are there other things that stand out in their memories? No one mentioned those specifically. What stood out more were larger, instead of small changes like this particular spice isn't here anymore, what stood out more were changes about the building and the systems happening within it. For example, the goods used to all come in non-plastic containers. You know, think of jute and wicker and other things that also had their own smell attached to them. And

now everything is plastic. And some of the older people I talked to also spoke about their memories of still having merchants from many different countries coming to the shores of the Golden Horn and visiting the spice market. And I think at some point, it really changed from being a true commercial trading center to a touristic space. If you walk through the spice market, you'll see so many, for example, teas that are really just made up concoctions where they just throw different flowers together and give it some fancy name that like love tea is a very popular one. For example, those sorts of things did not exist at that time. Saffron would be another one. You can find real saffron in the spice market still, but it's very, very difficult. And most of what you'll find is really turmeric or possibly safflower marketed as saffron.

So the reorientation of the market around a transient tourist population who maybe are looking for the experience of buying in a certain way rather than purchasing a certain good of a certain quality has actually really changed the way things are sold. That makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. Though you can, you can absolutely still see people going there and testing out the goods and smelling the spices, especially the older generation. I remember one time that I was in there, there was a woman going around from stall to stall, smelling the henna because she wanted to find the freshest henna she could find. And the way to do that was by smell. And the way to do that is by smell. Absolutely. Yeah. So what if you walk through the Spice Bazaar today, would you say are the dominant smells that you encounter? And maybe we can have our audience, you know, write in and tell us other things that they remember from

smelling. So one is you can't ignore the air around you and the environment around you. So you still have the sea and you have the smell of fish normally. And of course, it's not in the Spice Bazaar itself, but the coffee places right around it. I mean, they really pump out the coffee smell. I did some interviews with the people in the line to buy coffee, and the large majority of them are in the line simply because they smelled the coffee and decided they wanted coffee. So not in the bazaar, but certainly affecting the bazaar smellscapes. There are some merchants within the Spice Bazaar that put rose water into their sort of air conditioning and ventilation systems because the tourist profile has changed enough that that is very attractive to some tourists. But you still get this very

changing smells because you have a tea shop and then you still have some maybe linen shops and then there's another spice shop. So as you pass through, everything sort of mixes together, but some of the strongest smells are the coffee and the fish and the stronger spices, cinnamon, for example, the peppers, all the various mounds of freshly ground pepper they have out and some of the dried fruits. Well, it's so interesting because we started out the podcast talking about how these merchants would unload their wares quickly in order to get the smells to waft up the hill to the palace so that people would come down and buy. And clearly merchants today are still employing this as a mode of marketing as here as elsewhere. I mean, you know, my own suburban childhood was marked by the smell of Cinnabon.

Waft it through the mall, it's artificial. But they know that the smell can provoke a set of feelings and behaviors. So we'll take a short music break now. And in the second part of the podcast, we'll come back and talk a little bit more about bigger methodological issues about you know what is smell and how do we study its history Welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson here today with Lauren Davis. We're discussing the history of smells in Ottoman Istanbul and beyond. So the first part of the podcast, we really tried to think a little bit about

what the history of smells has been in Istanbul's Spice Bazaar. I want to turn now to the kind of bigger methodological question that as a historian myself, it kind of like boggles my mind. I mean, how do we study the history of smell? This is something that seems to me to be very embodied, subjective. How do we access information about what smells, how smells were experienced in the past? That's a great question. And unfortunately, there's not one concrete answer to it. Sensory history was an offshoot of sensory anthropology, and both of them really only came to the forefront in the 1990s. So they're still very new sort of academic boundary. Obviously, you can read historical documents and you can look for

references. People will mention smells, they'll mention sounds, they'll mention things. There are sort of mundane daily things like shopping lists and payment records. You can also look at the documents for pious foundations, which will record paying somebody to perfume the mosque once a week. However, it's really important that when you do this, you don't just mine your documents for these references. And it still needs to be contextualized. As you said, it's a very subjective experience, and it's very much based in the body. And so as you're looking, you need to think about the larger context and the person who's writing and the biases that they might have. I think it's very easy to sort of get trapped into reading something like traveler accounts, which are very rich in sensory data. But you also need

to remember that they're writing from a particular perspective and they're not necessarily aware of the culture that they're in at all times. And so to a certain extent, you need to tailor the research to the question that you're asking. As we discussed earlier, you could do really in-depth research. You could look at all the port documents for a year. And you could factor in the weather patterns and look at the building materials and make educated guesses about the amount of people in a place, and how long it's been since they've bathed in some fashion, and the types of perfumes you may be wearing, but you're still not going to get a full knowledge

of what a smellscape of a place was, and so you also need to be okay knowing that it's always going to be a little bit unknown, and a little bit creative and uncertain, but if you can do this to an extent, knowing that it's always going to be a little bit unknown and a little bit creative and uncertain. But if you can do this to an extent and you can put yourself into the shoes of somebody and try to understand it from their perspective, I think it really provides a new way to look at history in a perhaps more equalizing way. And I mean, this is something that obviously all historians grapple with in one way or another.

I mean, the fact that you can never completely recapture the past, no matter how many port documents you may have the opportunity to read. traveler's accounts is not only the subjectivity of the person who's recording, however, you may be accessing that knowledge, but also the fact that the normative way we experience smells may have changed over time. I mean, so for example, a smell that I today might find disgusting, might have been extremely appealing to people in a certain place at another moment in the past. So how do you how do you think about how smells have changed over time in terms of being good or bad? And can you give us an example of a smell that you think has undergone such a transformation? So smell is a really interesting sense. It's different from all of our other senses. And I'm sorry, I'm going to get a little bit into the science here, what happens in your body. So when you see something or you touch something, that sensory data first goes to the thalamus in your brain.

And that's sort of like the brain's processing center. And then it sends that information out to the other necessary areas in the brain. But smell, smell does something different. Smell goes through your nose, through the olfactory bulb, and it connects to two areas in your brain called the amygdala and it connects to two areas in your brain called the amygdala and the hippocampus and the amygdala is the emotional center of the brain and the hippocampus is a long-term memory center of the brain so smell has this privileged connection to these two centers in your brain which makes it a little bit special in terms of memory. And so when we talk about how smells have changed and whether smells are good or bad, smell is particularly, it can be affected very easily by the experience that you have when

you first notice a smell or the second time you notice a smell. And so when we talk about good or bad, it really, really is subjective and in a sort of cultural context. And it sometimes can be difficult to understand all the different forces that may be influencing what a person thinks about smell. I think one good example is incense. It's not necessarily an Ottoman one, but it is a good historical example. Many religious traditions have incense in some fashion, again, because of this relationship between smell and the emotional centers of your brain and the long-term memory centers. And so when Christianity was developing and spreading throughout this area, they actually banned incense. Because pagan religions before it had used incense so heavily, they just had to do an

outright ban. It didn't matter if you tried to change the ingredients a little bit, there's still sort of this base association with incense and the gods that were worshipped before Christianity. So for several hundred years, churches had no incense. Because they were afraid it would connect people in some kind of very deep way to a different pagan past. Right. This sort of larger communal memory that, you know, is sometimes hard to touch or understand in some way. But that was the belief and that was their understanding. Eventually, that memory was sort of erased and delinked.

And then Christianity began to incorporate incense again. Not all Christian denominations use incense, but many do. But at the same time, for those people that don't use incense today, going to a church that has incense, it can be a bit jarring and many people don't like it because they don't have that emotional connection that other people do have. To the smell. Exactly. Right.

that emotional connection that other people do have. To the smell. Exactly. Another good example of how smells and association to smells has changed is with rosewater. And rosewater for centuries has been associated with Islam and with the Prophet Muhammad specifically. It is absolutely a good smell. It was in the Islamic world.

People use it for cosmetics, they use it for food, even cleaning. We have several anecdotal stories throughout centuries of mosques and other sacred spaces being cleaned with rose water from Istanbul to Damascus to Jerusalem. I don't know if you've ever smelled real rose water, but it's a very, very light rose scent. And rose byproducts, rose oil and rose water,

are incredibly costly to make. It takes about 4,000 kilograms of petals to make one kilo of rose oil. So it's very labor intensive. It requires a ton of space and labor, and roses are only in bloom for about a month every year so the ottomans experimented with growing roses all over the empire they tried it in every place they could and they were really looking to find the most efficient roses as in it only takes 4 000 kilograms as opposed to 12 000 so they were really doing it to produce the oil absolutely and so now the two areas that grow what are considered to be the best roses for rose oil and cosmetic products and food are Esparta here in Turkey and the area around Kazanlak in Bulgaria. But because rose oil is so expensive, many companies try to recreate it,

not use it. There's a chemical compound in certain geraniums. It's called geranol and it's a very, very similar smell to roses and it can be used as a substitute. And they're much easier to grow. You can grow geraniums all year long. So it's much less costly. So now we have this inundation of rose scented products that aren't actually made with rose oil or rose water. And they're often much more concentrated. And a lot of people don't like them. They find them overbearing. They can't quite stand them. And cleaning products are interesting because they're formulated according to the countries in which they're being sold. So in America, we have lots of pine scented cleaning products because for us, the smell of pine is associated with freshness and cleanliness. Here, rose is one of those things.

And so we have rose scented cleaning products, but not actually using real rose water or real rose oil, instead using this sort of extract taken from geraniums. And it becomes a very sort of overbearing smell. And so people, they no longer experience real rose water as much as they experience these strongly scented rose cleaning products and don't like them. Right, so then they begin to have a negative association. Exactly, or they think that I won't like rose water. Like there's no way that I would want that in my cosmetics

or put it in my food because I associate it with the bathroom that they just cleaned. And so it still is very much considered a sacred smell within Islam. But there's these other sort of phenomena happening that are affecting people's perceptions. Interesting. So we've seen the example that perceptions of smell differ not only between time, but also between places. What some people in some places consider to be clean bathroom smell, other people consider to be costly cosmetic smell, other people consider to be a smell they don't want to experience at all. Right. Maybe we could just think a little bit then about the sort of big picture question of why do the history of smell? And I think there's a connected

question here which is why why haven't we done it the discipline of history has often been dominated by the eye I mean things that we read things that we see things that we experience visually are really at the kind of top of the kinds of sources that we work with so why has that been the case do you think and what could we gain by adding smell to the picture? So this domination of the visual in history, and in frankly, most academic areas, is very much a product of the evolution of, let's say, Western thought or Western European thought, which really, in the end, goes back to the Greek and Romans in many ways and their thoughts

about the senses. So Plato, for example, prioritized reason over all of the senses, but he also said that sight is the foundation of philosophy. Aristotle, for example, created a hierarchy with sight and sound at the top and touch and taste at the bottom

with smell in the middle. Other scholars throughout centuries really thought about the senses in different ways, and they considered how maybe the senses were important to understanding the world. Roger Bacon, for example, felt that they were imperative to understanding the external world, as did others. But during the Enlightenment, we again really had this idea that the senses needed to be in some sort of hierarchy and that smell was absolutely one of the baser senses with sight and sound at the top and so we have people like Charles Darwin even said that smell was a very slight service and Kant considered

it unproductive Marx for example considered example, considered touch, taste, and smell primitive. And I think that really comes to the heart of it. It was, you know, we start to get into this era of colonization and the divisions between the primitive world and the civilized world, which I'd like to note I'm using in quotation marks. And this type of thinking really helped create a hegemony of vision. And so visual observation became a way to understand the world, but it also became a way to separate us and them. And so in the mind of many post-enlightenment thinkers, the non-white, non-European societies were associated with these baser senses and therefore should not be part of

this rational academic world that we are approaching in our you know history anthropology everything really comes out of that tradition and furthermore we also have to understand our own how our own environments affects our scholarship and so we live in a world that smells are not particularly appreciated. We want to be in public spaces that don't have quote bad unquote smells in them. You know, we want to regulate spaces. We want to punish bad smells and sounds. And so we're used to these modern values and definitions of cleanliness. So we have to throw all of that out a little bit if we want to approach history and understand that not every society thought about the senses in the way that we do and not every person did. And not just that, but it seems like a lot of the examples that you've given us today actually can

show us how smell could offer really new possibilities for thinking about things like, how smell could offer really new possibilities for thinking about things like, say, region or trade. I mean, so to imagine instead of talking about the Islamic world, could we talk about the rosewater world? I mean, the places in the world where people like the smell of rose oil, for example, what would that look like? Or could, you know, instead of talking about the Ottoman Empire, could we talk about networks of trade in ambergris and where that smell would have been dominant in the ports? I mean, it actually could really change, I think, maybe some of the ways that we think about space as it has been visually imagined. Absolutely. I think there's a lot of room for scholarship in that. If we think about those worlds, we think about the

places where ambergris is traded and the places that like rosewater. I think there's also a lot of interesting research to be done on those borders then. What happens at that boundary and is there a boundary and how dissemination happens because all of these spaces originally started in just one little place, you know, frankincense, myrrh, the Arabian Peninsula, cinnamon, just, you know, on a few islands out in the West Indies. And they spread over time. And I think it's a different way, a difficult way, but a different way of thinking about human interaction. And it's really the basis for a lot of how history has developed. And how we experience the other. Anybody who's traveled can probably think of a time when their experience of something that was new to them

was dominated by something like taste or smell. I think we can suggest to our audience that there are really rich possibilities for future research in this field. I want to close our conversation today, Lauren, by asking you to put on your other hat as a curator and to ask you if, as I think we've talked about here today, Lauren, by asking you to put on your other hat as a curator and to ask you if, as I think we've talked about here today, smell has a history and could be or is a really important

historical resource. What kinds of then preservation or learning about the past through smell and keeping it for the future do we owe ourselves or future generations? So smell, again, is a bit different because we can record sounds. We don't have recordings, obviously, from thousands of years ago, but we can now at least record sounds and we can take pictures and we can write down recipes

with very intense details that could help them be recreated. But smell, preserving smell in the sense, in the way that we preserve these other senses is still, for all intents and purposes, impossible. The perfume industry has this really fascinating technology called headspace. And it's in essence a glass dome. And they would place it over something like a rose. And then it would measure all of the organic compounds floating through the air emanating from the rose to get the chemical signature of the rose so that they could then try to recreate that for the perfumes. However,

that doesn't, we don't have that technology for large spaces. We can't just stick a glass dome in the spice market and attempt to figure out what the spice, save the chemical signature of the spice market. That's just not possible yet. So we need to preserve them in other ways. And I think by acknowledging smell and the senses as part of cultural heritage and making it part of the dialogue, it's really the best way forward. Because it's not just that the smell is important, it's that all the values and the stories and the memories attached to them that make them important. And that's what makes it heritage. It's not the object. It's everything, the intangible things

surrounding it and how people feel about it. So recognizing it, getting people to think about it, and then doing what we can to continue to figure out how it can be preserved. Perfume companies have archives in different ways. We have based sort of samples of things like ambergris and rose for the future. But we need to get people talking about it and sharing memories and sharing stories and remembering what their life was like and how it's changed. And that's really where we can see cultural heritage is how, what was it like 60 years ago? And what's it like now? And how have these things changed? And for example, if you go to many Turkish people here and you ask them what their grandparents' Republican era house smelled like,

here and you ask them what their grandparents' Republican-era house smelled like, and they will mention mothballs, and they will mention lavender cologne, and many other things, raka most probably, but then you look at how many houses have those things now, and it's different, and that's okay. We don't want to freeze heritage. We don't want to say it has to be like this and you can never change, but it's about understanding where our memories come from and what sort of aspects go into that and how we can just share it for the future. Well, it sounds like there's a lot more thinking and researching that needs to be done on this question. So we'll turn that over to our audience of listeners. So we'll hope the next couple decades can bring some new research and some new strategies towards these questions. So, Dr. Davis, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you so much for having me. And I think, you know, we learned a lot. I certainly have a lot of new questions to consider as I walk around the city, just even paying attention to the things that I smell or don't smell. as I walk around the city, just even paying attention to the things that I smell or don't smell. For those who want to find out more about the history

of Istanbul's smellscapes, you can check out our website where we will post a bibliography for this episode, some other resources you can turn to. Please also come join us on Facebook

where you can ask us questions, leave us comments, and stay in touch with our community of now over 30,000 listeners. So thanks for listening. That's all for this episode. Until next time, take care. Altyazı M.K.