The Scent of Armenia

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

A frequent topic of late on Tozsuz Evrak has been Ottoman officials saying no.  They said no to a certain magician in Istanbul in 1884.  They also said no to a cigarette paper cover with a map of Russia and Japan in Trabzon in 1904.  Today's document shows them saying no to a product purporting to be the scent of Armenia and, if its boosters were to be believed, the scent of health itself.  

First, Armenia.  Beginning in Libyan Tripoli in 1892, officials had noticed "small dark papers...from a kind of nice scented incense" with the words "Scent of Armenia" (Ermenistan kokusu) written on them.  By post, the papers could be sent anywhere, the official added.  To prevent the sweet-smelling papers' circulation, the Ottomans circulated some less sweet-smelling papers of their own, forwarding interdiction notices to the police directorate of every Ottoman province (see the lower right corner for the list).  No reason was explained.         

Now, health.  In the late nineteenth century, a Frenchman named Auguste Ponsot visited the Ottoman domains.  He left particularly impressed with the practice of burning styrax in homes, apparently commonly used among Armenians as a deodorizer.  Whether because of a love for Armenians or a love for deodorizers, when Ponsot returned to France, he collaborated with a pharmacist friend to commodify this practice.  After some tinkering, they concocted Papier d'Arménie and set up shop in the Parisian suburb of Montrouge.  At the same time, germ theory of disease was catalyzing new ideas about public health that affected everything from interior design to the length of women's dresses, as detailed in books like Nancy Tomes's The Gospel of Germs.  Ponsot's papers capitalized on these new visions of health.  Marketing for Papier d'Arménie presented the product as the heroic vanquisher of maladies, sending Paris's petri dish of pathogen-coughing women-cum-gargoyles scurrying away from the Hotel-Dieu - Paris's oldest hospital - and back to the sewers and the Grim Reaper.    

"Clean the Air by Burning Paper of Armenia." Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  

It's not clear if the papers prohibited by the Ottoman authorities in 1892 hailed from Ponsot's Montrouge factory.  Given the similar descriptions of the products and the proximity of Libya to France, it does seems quite plausible.  And if Papier d'Arménie and Ermenistan Kokusu were the same, it raises a capitalist irony if ever there was one: the scent of Armenia came from far away from any place that had or ever would be called Armenia.  And, if the Ottomans had their way, the scent of Armenia wouldn't get in either.         

Source: BOA, DH-MKT 2008/77 (17 Ra 1310 [9 Ekim 1892])

Libya

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