Every culture is mesmerized by the unexplainable, but rarely does one find a talisman that could turn an ancient belief into a versatile global image as the Turkish "nazar boncugu," the famed evil eye beads.
Although their appearances may vary, evil eye beads usually come in tricolor glass: a black dot in the middle, enclosed in a white inner circle and with both surrounded by a dark blue edging. The talisman goes by different names around the Levant and the Mediterranean, all meaning the glare of the envious, the jealous: "ayn al hasud" in Arabic, "ayn hara" in Hebrew, "to mati" in Greek and "nazar" in Turkish.
