Nazar

The nazar answers a specific fear: that admiration itself can wound. Across the Mediterranean and Middle East, the belief complex that English calls the evil eye holds that an envious or even openly admiring glance, especially at children, at beauty, at conspicuous good fortune, can transmit harm, often without the glancer's intent.

Arabic calls the striking glance nazar, the look; Greek calls the affliction mati; Hebrew ayin hara; Spanish carried mal de ojo to the Americas. The defenses are as widespread as the fear, and the most recognizable of them is the staring blue and white glass eye. The logic is apotropaic: an eye to meet the eye. A fixed, unblinking gaze confronts the envious look and absorbs or reflects it, and a nazar that cracks or shatters is widely said to have done its work, taking the blow meant for its owner, after which it is replaced without ceremony. The bead is hung over house doors and shop tills, pinned to babies' clothes, wired to horse harnesses and motorcycle mirrors, molded into cufflinks and set into pavements. Folklorists have mapped both the belief and its border: it is dense from the Mediterranean through the Middle East into South Asia, and largely absent from the indigenous traditions of East Asia, the Americas and Australia. Alan Dundes, who edited the standard casebook on the subject, gathered the classic studies of the complex, from accounts of envy in peasant communities to his own reading of the belief in terms of life-giving moisture and its loss.

Apotropaic eyes are ancient in the eastern Mediterranean. Archaic Greek drinking cups were painted with great staring eyes, ships carried eyes at their prows, and eye beads in glass and faience circulated in the region from antiquity, blue being both the color of scarce and startling eyes and a color long associated with warding. Frederick Elworthy's Victorian survey The Evil Eye gathered this material into the first broad English account of the amulet tradition, tracing eye charms, horns and hand gestures across the classical and modern Mediterranean.

The modern nazar boncugu, the eye bead of Turkey, descends through Anatolian glasswork. Small furnaces in villages near Izmir, notably in the village now known as Nazarkoy, still make the beads by hand, layering molten glass in dark blue, white and pale blue and setting the pupil while the disc is hot, and the handmade craft persists even as molded and plastic versions pour from factories to meet a demand that shows no sign of fading. What distinguishes the nazar from many amulets is its openness. It carries no scripture and belongs to no confession; Turkish Muslims, Greek Christians and Sephardi Jews have all hung the same blue eye, sometimes alongside specifically religious protections such as scriptural verses, crosses or the hamsa hand. It is protection stripped to a single gesture: something is looking at you; let this look back.