Abstract
From horse dung to garlic, olfactory debates raged in interwar Poland. Smells are ubiquitous and substantially influence how we perceive the atmosphere of a given place. This article focuses on ‘smell affairs’ and olfactory sensibilities that were emerging in the city of Lublin in Poland after 1918. In particular, it addresses what Lublin's courtyard smells tell us about the condition, development and mindset of a Polish city at that time. On their way into the ‘modern’ era, Lublin's citizens began to complain about rural elements interfering with the ‘metropolitan’ character of Lublin as well as how ‘ethnic smells’ of fellow Jewish citizens would intrude upon the air of ‘their’ ‘Polish’ city. Poking one's nose into the air and the ‘smellscapes’ of the urban courtyard, one can observe what was regarded as a part, or not, of a modern city in independent Poland.
Highlights
A distinct smell scenery characterised the urban courtyards of the Polish city of Lublin in the interwar period
This article focuses on ‘smell affairs’ and olfactory sensibilities that were emerging in the city of Lublin in Poland after 1918. It addresses what Lublin’s courtyard smells tell us about the condition, development and mindset of a Polish city at that time. On their way into the ‘modern’ era, Lublin’s citizens began to complain about rural elements interfering with the ‘metropolitan’ character of Lublin as well as how ‘ethnic smells’ of fellow Jewish citizens would intrude upon the air of ‘their’ ‘Polish’ city
In 1928 the main Lublin daily Ziemia Lubelska complained: There are courtyards haunted by such a smell that you would risk fainting if you passed them without a handkerchief pressed to your nose
Summary
From horse dung to garlic, olfactory debates raged in interwar Poland. Smells are ubiquitous and substantially influence how we perceive the atmosphere of a given place. 42 Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Halliday, Great Stink; Barnes, Great Stink; Inglis David, ‘Sewers and Sensibilities: The Bourgeois Faecal Experience in the Nineteenth-Century City’, in Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward, eds., The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). By the late 1920s and early 1930s Lublin’s citizens were lodging an increasing number of complaints to the Public Health Department or Sanitary Commission regarding olfactory nuisances This increasing smell sensitivity was the result of a major urban sanitation initiative in the framework of establishing ‘Great Lublin’ in 1925, which, at the same time, reflects the ideological aim of establishing a ‘Polish city’ strongly driven by national health concerns.[80]
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