I knew how to write basic HTML and add and resize photos, but that was the extent of my web design experience. I had absolutely no idea how to set up a more complex website that could handle a changing inventory, a shopping cart, and credit card payments. Those were skills I would spend the next three months teaching myself.
Initially I called my new business “Homesick Turk,” but someone mentioned to me the “sick” in “Homesick” made him think of vomiting. I did not want people to associate my business with puke, so I quickly changed the name to “Moda Jewels.” Moda is the name of the neighborhood on Istanbul’s Asian side I had moved to a few months before to be closer to my girlfriend. The word also means “fashion” in Turkish.
As I improved my website skills, I started putting the jewelry up on the site to see what would sell. I expected the silver jewelry to sell the fastest, but it barely moved at all. What did move, 20 times as fast as anything else, was something called the “evil eye,” a Mediterranean good luck charm I had scooped up in my experimental dragnet at the Kapali Carsi.
The evil eye, known in Turkish as the nazar boncuk, is a circular blue glass disk with a circle of white glass melted into the middle of it, and a circle of black glass melted into the middle of that. The three, or sometimes four, concentric circles look like an eye. The eyes range in size from tiny beads that would easily fit 10 to a hand to the size of large dinner platters.
An evil eye protects its owner from the jealousy of others. The underlying assumption is that the owner’s life has enough richness in it that other people look upon the owner with jealousy. Their jealous gazes release evil spirits that would bring bad luck to the person on the receiving end of the gazes if it weren’t for the evil eye staring back at the evil spirits and scaring them away.
Since the evil eyes are made of glass they chip or break often. Legend has it that when one breaks it is because it was doing its job, absorbing bad spirits before they could harm the owner.
The evil eye is not just a Turkish traditional belief. Persians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Italians, even Central and South Americans all have versions of the evil eye. The Greeks call it matiasma, the Persians cheshm nazar, the Jews ayin hara, the Italians mal occhio. Everyone considers the evil eye native to his own land, but it is so ancient a concept I suspect it predates all the people who claim it as their own.
Evil eye charms come in many forms – earrings, bracelets, key chains, even wall hangings and floor tiles. These days most of them are made in Turkey no matter where in the world they are sold. When people buy matiasmas on the streets of Athens, or cheshm nazars in Los Angeles, chances are they were made in Turkey.
Selling evil eyes taught me a lot about Turkey, but it taught me even more about my own country. For example, I learned that by conservative, United States Census-based estimates, 350,000 Iranians live in the US, the biggest concentration of them being along the northern edge of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. Over half a million Armenians live in the US, and in true Diaspora fashion twice as many Armenians live outside of Armenia as live inside of it. Ten times as many Greeks live in the US as do Turks, even though Turkey is five times larger than Greece.
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[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Selling jewelry” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]