Cultural Post: My Culture Project

[Yazmeen Nunez]

My cultural presentation was based on the legend and revered powers of the evil eye in Turkish culture.  This iconic part of Turkish culture has interested me for quite some time after I saw one of my Turkish friends toting one on a key chain at work.  The evil eye is a concept that has been perpetuated around the world since the age of Mesopotamian civilizations and is almost universal in its design.  The idea behind it is the existence of evil that curses those who are under the gaze of a jealous person.  This jealous person, whether they are aware of it or not, subjects this person to possible misfortune, particularly, in fact, surrounding the one thing of which the second person was jealous.  This works in conjunction with the idea that each person has some sort of third eye about them that can manipulate luck and the future.

The evil eye, therefore, protects the wearer or user from the negative effects of jealous leers.  The jewelry works by attracting all of the negative attention away from the user and toward the eye itself.  It then either disperses all of the energy by having it bounce off of the evil eye or shatters from the impact of such negative energy.  It is said that whenever a bead falls off of an article of evil eye jewelry, it means that the evil eye was just sent toward the user and that it fell due to its effective deflection of the negativity.  This superstition may sound perplexing and hyper-traditional, but other nations and cultures all over the world share similar ideas about the perpetuation of negative energy by jealous thoughts, even in the United States with the idea of the stink eye.

The most interesting thing I have discovered about this tradition is that the evil eye has become ingrained in Turkish culture so intricately that most Turks have at least one evil eye somewhere in their home.  Some airlines have even emblazoned their planes with the evil eye, a symbol not only representing good luck but also is distinctly Turkish.  Furthermore, it is imperative that all Turkish babies and children are adorned with the evil eye.  Even families that are not incredibly superstitious would never take a chance with the health and protection of their child, and so a fine baby shower present for a Turk would be anything with an evil eye on it. 

This entire project has been extremely interesting to me.  I have already been familiar with basic things about Turkish people like their cuisine, their fashions and their history, so I wanted to learn a little bit more about things that seem odd to me.  I found out that in fact this unique tradition is fairly universal.  It also introduced me to the way that the Turkish collective think about such traditional matters.  This has revealed to me that tradition is extremely important to the Turks, although they are a genuinely revolutionary nation.