Chora Church (Kariye Mosque / Museum)

The Church of the Holy Savior in Chora traces its origins to a monastery founded outside Constantinople's fourth-century walls, giving it the name chora, meaning 'in the country,' though the surviving structure dates mainly from a rebuilding financed by Byzantine statesman Theodore Metochites in the early 14th century, around 1315 to 1321. Metochites commissioned the interior decoration that makes the church renowned today: an extensive cycle of mosaics and frescoes covering the narthexes and side chapel, depicting the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ in scenes such as the Enrollment for Taxation, the Journey to Bethlehem, and the Dormition of the Virgin, executed in the refined, naturalistic style of the Palaiologan Renaissance, a late flowering of Byzantine art. The parekklesion, or side chapel, added as a funerary chapel, contains an especially significant fresco of the Anastasis (Christ's Harrowing of Hell), considered one of the finest surviving works of Byzantine painting. After the 1453 Ottoman conquest, the building was converted into the Kariye Mosque, and its figurative mosaics were plastered over in keeping with Islamic prohibitions on figural imagery in mosques, which inadvertently preserved them for centuries. Turkey's government secularized it as a museum in 1948, prompting the Byzantine Institute of America and Dumbarton Oaks to carry out a major uncovering and restoration of the mosaics through the 1950s, and it was reconverted into an active mosque in 2020 following the same legal process applied to Hagia Sophia. As a working mosque, it now presents the historic decoration in situ within the narthexes, which remain viewable, while the former nave functions as prayer space with carpeted flooring; a further conservation campaign addressing water damage and plaster stability has continued intermittently since the 2020 reconversion.