Also called nazar boncuğu, evil eye bead, mati, malocchio
A blue glass eye bead hung in the home or worn on the body so that envious or admiring looks are caught and reflected before they can do harm.
TraditionTurkish and eastern Mediterranean folk belief
RegionTurkey and the eastern Mediterranean
EraOttoman period to present
Moon◐ Any moon
DayAny
ElementWater
Difficulty●○○ Simple
Time10 minutes
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
The working
Choose a bead, or better still accept one as a gift; in much of the region a gifted nazar is thought the strongest.
Rinse it in clean water and dry it to give it a fresh start.
Thread it on a cord and hang it where people first look: by the front door, over a baby's cot, in a shop window or from a car mirror.
For personal protection, pin a small bead inside clothing or wear it on a bracelet.
When someone praises your child, home or good fortune, it is customary to answer with a protective phrase such as the Turkish maşallah.
If the bead cracks or breaks, thank it, bury or discard it, and hang a new one. Tradition says a broken nazar has absorbed a blow meant for you.
Take care: Keep small beads and cords away from babies and young children, who can choke on them or tangle in cords; hang cot charms well out of reach.
Versions across time and place
i
Greek mati and xematiasma
Greece and Cyprus · 19th century to present
Greeks wear the blue mati bead in the same way, but when someone already feels struck by the eye a relative performs xematiasma. Drops of olive oil are let fall into a glass of water while a prayer passed down in the family is said under the breath. If the oil spreads and vanishes the eye is present, and the rite is repeated until the drops hold together.
Recorded in: Alan Dundes (ed.), The Evil Eye: A Casebook (1981; reissued 1992)
ii
Italian malocchio and the cornicello
Southern Italy, especially Naples · 19th century to present
In southern Italy the protective object is the cornicello, a small twisted red horn of coral, glass or gold. Custom holds it should be given rather than bought for oneself. Against a malocchio already cast, older women diagnose with oil dropped in water much as in Greece, and the hand gestures of the horns or the fig are made to ward off a dangerous look.
Recorded in: Napoli Sotterranea, 'The red horn: Naples' best-known good luck charm'; Dundes, The Evil Eye: A Casebook
iii
Nazarköy glass workshops
Aegean Turkey · 20th century to present
The familiar flat blue bead is still blown by hand in a few kiln workshops near Izmir, in a village renamed Nazarköy. Molten glass is wound in layers of colour on an iron rod to build up the eye. The craft is in decline as cheap moulded beads replace hand-made ones.
Recorded in: Bilkent University thesis on nazar bead craft (repository.bilkent.edu.tr)
History
Fear of the envious glance is among the oldest documented beliefs around the Mediterranean and Near East. Eye-shaped beads of faience and glass were made in the ancient world, and Phoenician and later Roman glassworkers produced layered eye beads that look strikingly like the modern nazar. The idea is simple: an eye stares back at the eye that means harm, or draws its first glance so the person behind it is spared. Praise without a blessing was thought especially risky, above all for babies and livestock.
Under the Ottomans the flat blue glass bead became the standard form, and it spread across the Balkans, the Levant and Greece. The folklorist Alan Dundes gathered studies of the belief from India to Scotland in his 1981 casebook and argued it is one of the most widespread folk ideas in the world. The Science Museum in London holds a nazar worn by a soldier in Palestine during the First World War, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic keeps a Turkish house charm of six eye beads.
Sources
The Evil Eye: A Casebook · Alan Dundes (ed.), 1981
