Evil eye (nazar)

Is the evil eye good or bad?

In the belief, the evil eye is the harm, and the eye bead is the protection against it. The TDV encyclopedia describes three kinds of amulet: showy objects worn over clothing or hung where they can be seen in a house, to draw the glance to themselves; protective signs worn under clothing, to turn the glance back; and written formulas. Religious authorities differ over the charms. The TDV encyclopedia notes that hadith accept the evil eye as real (“if anything could outrun fate, it would be the evil eye”) and recommend seeking refuge in God from it. Islamweb, a fatwa site, rules that hanging a khamsa or any other amulet to repel the evil eye is impermissible, and may be shirk (idolatry).

The Greek Orthodox Church considers the mati at odds with Christianity, USA Today reported in 2017. Demetrios Nikou, high priest of the Cathedral of Athens, told the paper that only the Christian cross gives true protection: “Religion-wise, the blue eye does not mean anything. This is a cultural symbol.”

The blue glass bead of İzmir

Glass eye beads are a recent craft in Turkey. The folklorist Yılmaz Irmak, of Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University, writes that the first were made at the end of the 19th century by Arab glassmakers from Egypt, who set up furnaces in İzmir’s Arap Hanı and Kemeraltı. In the 1930s the smoke and the risk of fire pushed them out to the village of Görece, and in the 1950s some settled at Kurudere, now Nazarköy, where they taught Turkish craftsmen. The dates are not settled. Irmak’s own introduction has the Egyptians arriving in the 1930s, and İzmir’s education directorate, in its guide to the city, says there is no clear record of the bead’s history in İzmir: only that Egyptian masters first made it as a glass bead at the Arap Hanı, that Turks who learned from them made beads for mules, and that the “eye” was added once coloured glass was being made. Irmak cites Küçükerman for placing the bead in the eastern Mediterranean glassmaking tradition.

The beads are still made at Görece and Nazarköy, in dome-shaped furnaces called ocak; when Irmak wrote in 2022, Nazarköy had five and Görece two. The furnace is fired with pine early in the morning and filled with waste glass, with copper oxide for the blue. A core of glass is wound on a thick iron rod, and the white and blue eye is laid on it with a thin one. Irmak writes that Mahmut Sür, a Nazarköy master, was declared a living human treasure by UNESCO in 2012, and that his workshop exports beads to the United States above all, and to Brazil, Greece and Japan. The education directorate counts the beads among Turkey’s intangible cultural heritage.

Names and customs by country

Beliefs about who casts the evil eye, and who suffers it, differ from place to place. In Greece, according to USA Today, people with blue or green eyes are thought to give and receive the evil eye more easily, and babies are most at risk, so families give a small gold or silver pin with a mati to hang by a newborn’s crib. Irmak records the same belief about blue-eyed people in Turkey. In Mexican culture, a resource guide from the library of UMass Chan Medical School explains, drawing on Rachel Spector’s Cultural Diversity in Health and Illness, babies are thought weak and open to an envious glance: a compliment without a touch can bring on the evil eye, and touching the child while praising it takes its power away. A Sicilian American interviewed for the University of Southern California’s Digital Folklore Archives in 2019 described the malocchio, “bad eyes”, and the corno, a horn charm that “looks like a pepper”, kept in the car or worn round the neck. His test for it was to drop olive oil into a bowl of water: if the oil forms the shape of an eye, the person has been struck.

The eye and the hand

The same fear lies behind the hamsa and the khamsa. The Jewish Virtual Library lists the counter-charms of Jewish folk practice: a mirror or a colour, red or blue, to turn the glance back on its source, and an outstretched hand to stop its rays. The British Museum’s note on a silver khamsa says that belief in the protective power of hand amulets dates back millennia.

The evil eye today

The Jewish Virtual Library notes that blue paint and a metal amulet shaped like an open hand are still widespread in Oriental Jewish communities. Among Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, praise is still qualified with keyn ayen hore, “may there be no evil eye”, shortened to kaynahora, and a red band tied round a newborn’s wrist or neck comes from the same fear. The TDV encyclopedia notes that protective eyes and hands are usually made of silver, and are sometimes tattooed on the body. Unicode, the standard for text on computers, has a character for the bead: U+1F9FF, NAZAR AMULET.

In Athens in 2017, USA Today found the mati on necklaces, bracelets and keychains in the Monastiraki market, and on everything from handmade soap to hotel lobbies; vendors said the trend was now drawing Greeks as well as tourists. The paper suggested the boom reflected interest in New Age spirituality and the strain of Greece’s debt crisis, and an American teacher shopping there called the eye “the new trendy cross”. The Washington Post noted in 2022 that the symbol had trended on fast fashion websites and in manifestation TikToks. Curationist finds the blue nazar more commercially popular in recent years, especially in North America and in tourist markets in the Mediterranean and in West and South Asia, and reports that some commentators put this down to a wish among diaspora communities to reconnect with their evil eye traditions.