สถานที่โมนาสติรากิMonastirakiΜοναστηράκι

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.

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.