I first encountered Marc-Antoine Barrois Aldebaran—a bold new tuberose fragrance by Quentin Bisch—in a small perfume shop in Ternopil, western Ukraine. The concept of buying decants is incredibly popular in Ukraine, and it makes high-end perfume exploration more accessible. I had read about Aldebaran’s launch and, being a devoted lover of tuberose, was immediately curious. Could it rival my benchmark, Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower?

I bought a small sample, tucked it into my bag, and tested it later that evening. One spray. That was enough. Aldebaran doesn’t bloom—it detonates.

This is not the “strawberries-and-cream” tuberose of Robert Piguet Fracas, nor the dewy green tendrils of Diptyque Do Son or the fruity-lactonic flirtation of Gucci Bloom. No. Aldebaran leans into the metallic, rubbery, mentholated side of the flower—amplifying its natural pungency, its blue-white chill, and even that faint, gasoline-like bite that tuberose can sometimes hide beneath its petals.

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We rarely think of scent as part of archives and historical records. The past is treated as visual, textual, factual — something we read or look at. But our lives are full of smells: the minty tang of toothpaste, burnt toast, the brine of sweat on public transportation, the coolness of a florist shop we pass on the way to work. These are not incidental. They are the scaffolding of memory. What we forget with our minds, the nose remembers.

I think often about this partial amnesia. What has been lost because it couldn’t be catalogued? How many women’s lives, marked by the scent of boiled milk, starch, soap, lily of the valley, have slipped away without trace? How many communities vanished, taking with them their voices, customs, foods — and scents. In Ukraine, I witnessed towns being flattened, homes scorched, and with them the quiet archives of everyday life. And elsewhere too, in places like Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, wars and displacements continue to erase not only histories but atmospheres, the very breath of places.

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Summer is the season of movement. As many of us travel, whether across countries or just to the next neighborhood, I’d like to offer a different way to mark the journey: not with photos or souvenirs, but with scent.

For years, I’ve made it a habit to map a place by its smells. This practice has changed how I travel. It slows me down. It sharpens my attention. And later, when memory fades, recalling scents brings everything back with astonishing clarity. I only have to imagine the honeyed aroma of orange blossoms to transport myself to Marrakesh. This memory then pulls on another one, and I delve into the fragrances of sun-warmed clay in a small oasis town, stone-roasted bread, and effervescent Moroccan cumin. In my mind, I travel again, going further and further.

Scent is the most ephemeral souvenir, but also the most faithful. Here’s how to begin building your own olfactory map.

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Can scent be tied to national identity? I received this question during a recent interview and the question stayed with me long after the conversation ended. It made me think about how we define ourselves, not only through language or landscape, but through something as invisible and visceral as smell.

My own story is layered. I was born into a family marked by complexity: Ukrainian, yes, but woven with many diasporic threads, braided through decades of dislocation, migration, and return. I didn’t fully grasp just how intricate this tapestry was until I began researching my family history for The Rooster House. Even after the book was already on shelves, I uncovered new archives and met relatives I hadn’t known existed. That’s how I learned that my mother’s side of the family had Roma and Jewish roots, and that my father’s lineage traced back to Tatarstan.

Since moving from Ukraine to the United States at the age of fifteen, I’ve lived in many places. Brussels has been my home for more than a decade. And yet, the place I return to is always Ukraine. That’s where the smells of my childhood reside. And that’s where scent has always felt like a language I understood instinctively.

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The last time I re-read The Gates of Europe was in Kharkiv. I was waiting for a friend at Makers, a coffee shop and artistic hangout in the city center. Kharkiv is the easternmost city in Ukraine that lies only 30 kilometers from the Russian border. This unfortunate geography makes it a target of near-daily bombardment. Just weeks earlier, Makers had replaced its large oval windows after a night of shelling, but when I sat there reading in its high-ceilinged, sunlit space, it felt like any other café in a busy urban center. Except that my phone kept buzzing with alerts about incoming drones and ballistic missiles.

Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian, published The Gates of Europe in 2015, one year after the annexation of Crimea and the start of war in the Donbas. Although the book spans over two thousand years of history, the narrative felt startlingly immediate, like reading the blueprint of a city I was only beginning to understand. Ukraine, in Plokhy’s telling, is not a periphery of someone else’s empire. It is the center of its own story—layered, scorched, reborn. That I was reading the history of Ukraine in Kharkiv, a city that embodies these layers and this capacity for rebirth, felt deeply significant. Clearly, I have a taste for immersive reading experiences.

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