Amulet Atlas

placesMonastirakiΜοναστηράκι

said mo-na-sti-RA-ki, 'little monastery'

also: Monastiraki flea market · Monastiraki Square

placeGreece and the AegeanGreececonfidence mediumneeds checking

A flea-market neighbourhood in the old town of Athens, built round Monastiraki Square and running along Pandrossou and Adrianou streets. Clothing, souvenirs and specialist shops; a metro station on the square; and, in the souvenir windows, trays of the blue glass eye.

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The story

The district takes its name from the square, and the square from the Church of the Pantanassa standing in it. It is one of Athens's main shopping districts and its best-known bargain quarter.

The object this atlas comes for has a Greek name. The bead a Turkish seller calls nazar boncuğu is máti in Greek, the eye, and it belongs to a tradition Greek authors were already describing in classical antiquity: Hesiod, Callimachus, Plato, Theocritus and Plutarch all mention the harmful look, and Peter Walcot's Envy and the Greeks listed more than a hundred ancient works that do. Greeks hung talismans in the house and wore amulets; Peisistratus hung a grasshopper figure before the Acropolis, a few hundred metres uphill from this square.

The trade is not a museum piece. A 2015 Pew survey of central and eastern Europe found a median of 48 per cent of adults reporting belief in the evil eye, with 66 per cent in Greece — the joint highest figure in the survey. The bead is also, in the encyclopedia's phrase, a popular choice of souvenir with tourists, and both those sentences describe the same stall.

Inference — the Monastiraki article itemises no charm, and this record does not claim a particular shop. What it claims is the pairing: the densest souvenir trade in Athens, in a country where two adults in three report the belief the object answers.

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Now

Trading, as a flea market and a tourist quarter. No day is marked open or closed below; the shops keep their own hours and no timetable is published for the district.

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Where

El Mercado de las BrujasThe BarkhorKhan el-KhaliliMerkatoVia San Gregorio ArmenoFushimi Inari-taishaSensō-jiMercado de SonoraThe Marrakesh soukThamelMana Whenua, Te PapaMercado de Brujas de GamarraQuiapo ChurchInsa-dongTha Phrachan amulet marketAkodessawa fetish marketThe Grand BazaarRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British MuseumThe amulet and charm cases, Pitt Rivers MuseumThe Lovett charms at Wellcome CollectionThe Egyptian galleries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pandrossou and Adrianou streets, Athens, Attica · 37.9764, 23.7236 precision: street cited

the coordinate published in the English Wikipedia article Monastiraki, read 2026-09-16

Opening days

Nobody has published days this project could read. That is not the same as closed.

What is on record about it

What this is near

carriesNazarthe bead sold here under its Greek name, mátimotifThe eyethe sign itself, in a city whose writers were describing the harmful look 2,400 years agotraditionGreek and Roman protective magicthe tradition this ground is the home of — Peisistratus hung his figure just uphillkinGorgoneionthe older Greek answer to the same look, cut on shields and temple roofs instead of strung on a cordmaterialGlassthe material the eye travels in, made in the eastern Mediterranean since about 1500 BCEparallelThe Grand Bazaarthe Istanbul market selling the identical bead under a Turkish name, two hours by airdescendantEvil eye braceletthe same eye on elastic, which is how most of the world now buys itstoryThe eye everywherethe long read that follows this sign across four continents

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

placeNazarthe Athens equivalent, where the same bead is called mátiplaceTamaone Athens market where the religious-goods shops selling these are within a few streetsparallelThe Grand Bazaarthe Athens lanes where the same bead is sold under its Greek name, máti

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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