An intriguing project has been initiated by a team of researchers of The Odeuropa project. This project involving researchers from across the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Slovenia, Germany and Netherlandsconcerns to preserve the scent existed in the European past, and bring it back to the world of present for the people to know how European scents smell like. This is stated to be the first International research project scrutinizing and collecting the scent of past and present times. The results of the reseach later to be reconstructed and preserved, and the report to be published in the "Encyclopaedia of Smell Heritage." The project is funded by a grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 programme, with total amount of €2.8m.

"This project aims to dive into digital heritage collections to discover key scents of Europe and bring them back to the nose," said Inger Leemans, the lead investigator of the project. "Much more so than any other sense, our sense of smell is linked directly to our emotions and our memories," added the other member of the team.

This project utilize the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to discover the key scents that have shaped the European cultures. The database later on would be archived for European smells through the ages. This project involves experts from several fields like computational linguistics, history, chemistry, and art, who are ready to record the smell as familiar as tobacco back in the days and as odd as 18th century smelling salts and dung chips.

Source : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/smell-history-europe-odeuropa-b1724198.html