The nazar: the blue glass eye that turns back the evil eye
The Turkish nazar boncuğu and the blue eyes of the Mediterranean: the ancient belief in the evil eye, Plutarch and Pliny, glass beads and the Greek mati.
In the bazaars of Istanbul, on the doors of Greek houses, on babies' bracelets and even on car dashboards, the blue glass eye is a familiar sight. In Turkish it is called nazar boncuğu, “evil eye bead”, from nazar, a word of Arabic origin meaning gaze. Its purpose is simple and very old: to intercept the envious gaze before it strikes people, animals, houses or crops.
An ancient fear
Belief in the evil eye is attested across much of the ancient world. In the Greek and Roman Mediterranean it was thought that certain people could cause harm with their gaze, even unintentionally. Plutarch devotes one of his Table Talks to the subject, asking why some individuals are said to bewitch with their eyes, and Pliny the Elder also discusses it in his Natural History. The Latin fascinatio and the Greek baskania designated this baleful power.
Amulets of many kinds were used against the malicious gaze, including images of eyes. As early as ancient Egypt and the Phoenician world, glass beads were made with concentric circles resembling an eye, and examples have been found in many Mediterranean cemeteries. A direct link with the modern nazar is plausible but not always demonstrable; what is certain is that the idea of answering one eye with another has a very long history.
The Turkish bead
The typical nazar boncuğu is made of concentric circles: dark blue on the outside, then white, light blue and a black dot in the centre. Blue, a colour very present in Anatolian ceramics and glass, is linked to the protective function in many popular explanations. Tradition holds that when a bead cracks or breaks, it has absorbed a wave of negative glances and should be replaced with a new one, without regret.
Craft production has been concentrated in a few villages of the Turkish Aegean, near Izmir, where glassmakers still shape molten glass in the flame using techniques handed down from generation to generation. Alongside these workshops there is now a huge industrial output supplying tourist markets throughout the Mediterranean, and the nazar now appears on cups, fabrics, jewellery and household objects.
From Turkey to Greece and beyond
Similar amulets are found in Greece, where the protective eye is called mati, in Cyprus, the Balkans, the Levant and Iran. In Greece, protection against the evil eye is often accompanied by family prayers and gestures, and the blue eye is given to newborns or hung in the home. The spread of this object largely follows the borders of the old Ottoman world and its trade networks, which for centuries moved goods, people and beliefs between Europe and Asia.
The nazar is an amulet that works by reflection: it does not attack, it returns the gaze. This idea, born in a world where envy was considered a real and dangerous force, survives today in coloured glass objects sold for a few coins. Even those who do not believe in the evil eye recognise in that little blue eye a fragment of Mediterranean history, able to unite peoples who in many other respects have felt far apart.