If smell is a topic that interests you, the visit: Belgrade’s Museum of Science and Technology! The exhibition “Note – a story about scent” will be held there from November 25, 2025 to April 30, 2026. The offer of such pleasure is very rare and you will not find it anywhere closer, so take your nose to the excitement!

Neighbors, congratulations! The realization of the Belgrade exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, the French Institute in Belgrade and the International Perfume Museum in Grasse. The accompanying program of the exhibition offers workshops, lectures and expert tours. The exhibition is also accompanied by a good book (the text is in Serbian and English), and it testifies to the thoroughness of the entire undertaking.

The sense of smell, to which we do not pay particular attention in this part of the world, plays an important role in our survival, and strongly influences emotions and memory. That means the quality of life! Therefore, intelligent behavior would include keeping this in mind.

As someone who has been teaching people how to create natural perfumes for the past two decades, I am saddened by the fact that in our region we pay so little attention to the experiences of our noses.

Considering that pleasant scents significantly affect the level of satisfaction, and that they play a significant role in maintaining a good mood and thus the body in balance, such behavior is, to put it mildly, unintelligent.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t even take much effort to change such a habit. You just have to decide to put your nose on permanent duty. And choose the scents to surround oneself with.

In many places in the world, the attitude towards the olfactory dimension of life is enviably different. The more time passes since my visit to Istanbul in the fall of 2024, the more often I think about my experience there, with a slight mixture of sentiment and envy. In Turkey, they treat olfactory experiences much differently than is usual here (in Croatia). For example, they use their Kolonya liberally in various situations. Both the everyday and the extraordinary ones. It is not unusual for the hosts to greet you at the door with a bottle of hand sanitizer when you come to visit someone. Or that, if you are traveling somewhere by bus, the driver “jumps” you upon entering by offering the same procedure.

There are many aromatherapy products on the market. The offer of the company Nature & Nurture is impressively abundant and expertly selected. Their products are formulated by pharmacist and aromatherapist Sevil Agalar.

Then, Istanbul is a city where there is a small, but extremely informative and expertly designed Perfume Museum. The one in Grasse, France could, to its advantage, take some ideas from the one in Istanbul.

The result of such generally accepted attitude towards smell as an important component of life was the fact that at the Istanbul’s Faculty of Pharmacy, as part of an aromatherapy workshop whose goal was to inform students about natural solutions, I was able to give a lecture on the option of creating perfumes from natural fragrant materials. I accompanied the presentation with an exhibition of such perfumes, which was a surprising and gladly accepted additional attraction for everyone.

And from the lectures of Turkish professors, I learned about the cultivation of fragrant herbs and the production of essential oils in Turkey. From the presentations of foreign and Turkish experts, I found it very interesting to learn about the local application of the principles of sustainability.

And the atmosphere that prevailed at the education on the creation of natural perfumes that I led for the next two days was absolutely beyond the scope of my previous teaching experience. In terms of the number of participants, the amount and types of questions asked, the kind gestures, the joy of the shared fragrant experience, and the roles of obedient students that everyone took on (including the participants-university professors). And in terms of the complete immersion in the fragrant impressions of all those present, who flocked from all over Turkey and neighboring countries. A surreal, indescribable experience.

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