Researchers revive Europe’s historical scents, including ‘the smell of hell’

EU-funded researchers are merging multidisciplinary expertise with AI tools to document, reconstruct and preserve Europe’s historical scents.

By Kaja Šeruga

What do you think hell smells like? British researcher Dr William Tullett has faithfully recreated its foul odour – or at least how our forefathers imagined it.

Thanks to an EU-funded research initiative called ODEUROPA, which ran from 2021 to 2023, Tullett did not need to spend years scouring archives