Lazwardلازورد · lapis blue, the colour of the night sky

The Baghdad Library · Essay 2

The blue eye: a short history of the nazar bead

About 6 minutes to read

A blue glass nazar bead: rings of dark blue, white and light blue around a dark centre
A nazar bead, drawn for Lazward. In ours, the dark centre holds a small golden crescent: the Moon we follow every night.

Walk through Istanbul, Athens, Beirut or Tehran and you will be watched by blue eyes: on doors, on taxi mirrors, pinned to a baby's clothes, set into the floor of a new shop. The bead has many names. In Turkish it is the nazar boncuğu, from the Arabic naẓar, "sight" or "a look". Greeks call it the máti, simply "eye". In Persian it is the cheshm nazar, and across India and Pakistan people say nazar lag gayi when a child falls ill after too much praise: "the look has caught them".

You will find one at the top of our front page. This essay explains why, and what it does and does not mean.

An old fear: envy that travels through the eyes

The belief behind the bead is far older than the bead. It holds that an envious or admiring look can harm what it lands on, often without the looker meaning it. The good thing, the new baby, the fine horse, the full harvest, is the thing at risk.

Archaeologists have found small "eye idols", figures that are little more than a pair of staring eyes, in northern Syria from around 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian texts include chants to turn away an evil look. The Hebrew Bible warns against eating the bread "of him that hath an evil eye" (Proverbs 23:6). The Greek writer Plutarch, around 100 CE, devoted a whole dinner-table discussion to the question and offered a natural explanation: strong feeling, he suggested, streams out through the eyes like rays and can strike what it looks at.

Islam inherited the idea and took it seriously. A saying of the Prophet recorded by al-Bukhārī states simply that "the effect of an evil eye is a fact" (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5740). That is why people across the Muslim world say māshāʾallāh, "as God has willed", when they praise a child: the words take the envy out of the compliment. Many religious scholars have preferred such words and prayers to any charm worn on the body, and some disapprove of amulets altogether. The bead survived anyway, as a custom of the street rather than a teaching of the mosque.

Why glass, and why blue

The answer to the evil eye was, very often, another eye: one that looks back and catches the harm first. Glass eye beads were being made around the eastern Mediterranean as early as the 16th century BCE, as glassmaking spread. The Phoenician traders of the Levant are often credited with making the deep blue glass eye popular across the Mediterranean. Assyrian amulets with blue eyes, and the Egyptian Eye of Horus, belong to the same wide family of watchful, protective eyes.

Why blue? Nobody knows for sure, and several explanations are told. In lands where most people have dark eyes, pale blue eyes were rare, and so they were the ones most suspected of the evil look; a blue eye would turn that power back on itself. Others point to the colour of the sky and of water, or to the blue stones of the ancient Near East. Among those stones the most prized was lapis lazuli, carved into amulets in Mesopotamia for thousands of years. In Arabic it is called lāzward, and it gave us our name.

Made by hand, near İzmir

In Turkey the classic beads come from a few villages near İzmir, above all Görece and Kurudere. The craft is usually traced to glassmakers who settled around İzmir in the late Ottoman period. The master takes molten glass from the furnace on an iron rod, shapes a dark blue drop, and adds the white, light blue and dark rings one by one while the glass is still soft. No two beads are quite alike. Only a handful of craftsmen still work this way today.

An old custom says that when a nazar bead cracks, it has done its job: it took a look that was meant for you. You thank it and hang a new one.

The bead today

The blue eye has long since left the village. It is a fashion motif, a logo, a tattoo. In 2018 it even became an emoji: 🧿, officially named "nazar amulet" (Unicode U+1F9FF). For millions of people in Turkey, Greece, the Arab world, Iran and South Asia, it is less a belief than a habit of kindness: a way of saying "may nothing spoil this".

Why it hangs on our front page

Lazward follows the Moon through the 28 stations that the astronomers of Baghdad used, from a part of the world where the blue eye has hung over doorways for thousands of years. Its colour is our colour. So we hung one at the top of the page, the way you would over the door of a new house.

We do not claim that it protects you, any more than we claim the stars decide your life. It is a greeting from the old world we draw on, and a small wish: may nothing spoil your evening.

Sources and further reading

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