The nazar boncuğu: history of the Turkish blue glass eye
Eye beads of the ancient Mediterranean, the glassmakers of Görece, the Greek mati: history and meanings of the nazar boncuğu, Turkey's blue glass amulet.
Anyone who has visited Turkey has seen it everywhere: hanging in buses and shops, on house doors, on cradles, set into bracelets or built into walls. It is the nazar boncuğu, literally «nazar bead», where nazar is a word of Arabic origin meaning gaze and, by extension, evil eye. It is a disc or drop of blue glass with concentric white, light blue and black circles that form an eye with a fixed stare.
Ancient ancestors
The idea of a glass eye as protection is much older than modern Turkey. Beads decorated with eye motifs, made by layering glass of different colours, are attested in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East from remote times, and they were produced and traded on a large scale by Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the first millennium BC. We do not know for certain what they meant to those who wore them, but their wide distribution suggests a protective value.
The blue colour has prompted many hypotheses. Some link it to the sky and the sacred, others to the rarity of blue eyes in the eastern Mediterranean, which would have made them suspect as bearers of the evil eye: setting a blue eye against a blue eye would have been a way of neutralising it. These are suggestive explanations, but not securely documented, and it is best to regard them as modern interpretations rather than established traditions.
The glassmakers of the Aegean
Today many handmade nazars come from a few villages in the province of Izmir, in particular Görece and Kurudere, where master glassmakers still work with small furnaces. The village of Görece is also known as Nazarköy, «nazar village». The molten glass is shaped around an iron rod and the coloured circles are applied one after another. Alongside this craft production there is an enormous industrial mass production, intended above all for the tourist market.
Uses and meanings
In Turkish tradition the nazar is given to newborn babies, hung on the door of a new house, fixed to a car's dashboard or at the entrance of a newly opened shop. A widespread belief holds that when the nazar cracks or breaks it has absorbed a harmful gaze and must be replaced. In Greece there is a very similar object, called mati, meaning «eye», used in the same way; versions of the same amulet are found in Cyprus, the Balkans, the Levant and Iran.
In recent decades the nazar has also become a tourist and decorative symbol, reproduced on textiles, ceramics and jewellery all over the world. For many it remains an object of affection and domestic tradition rather than of genuine belief, a way of wishing good luck. This evolution is common to many amulets: the religious or magical meaning fades, while the form is preserved and spreads far beyond its places of origin.
The nazar boncuğu sums up in a small glass object the oldest logic of defence against the gaze: answering an eye with an eye. From Phoenician beads to the furnaces of Görece, its history is also a history of craftsmanship and trade, which has carried an Anatolian symbol to market stalls across half the world without making it entirely lose its original meaning of protection and good wishes.