The building known as Chora Church or Kariye stands near the land walls of Constantinople. Its Greek dedication, the Church of Christ the Savior in the Chora, recalled an early sanctuary once located outside the city. The site passed through several building phases from late antiquity onward. Much of the present church took shape in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when patrons rebuilt a monastic complex whose position near imperial residences connected it to the religious and political life of Byzantine Constantinople.

Its celebrated interior decoration belongs chiefly to a campaign sponsored around 1315–1321 by Theodore Metochites, a scholar, statesman, and senior official under Emperor Andronikos II. Metochites added outer and inner narthexes and a funerary chapel, or parekklesion. Mosaics narrate the lives of the Virgin and Christ, while frescoes in the parekklesion center on resurrection and salvation. A donor portrait shows Metochites presenting the church to Christ, binding personal commemoration to one of the late Byzantine era's most ambitious artistic programs.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the church remained Christian for a time before being converted into a mosque, usually dated to the early sixteenth century under Atik Ali Pasha. A minaret and other Islamic fittings were added. Figural mosaics and frescoes were covered rather than systematically removed, which contributed to their survival. The building served Muslim worshippers for centuries, and repairs changed parts of its roof, masonry, and interior while maintaining the structure as an active neighborhood institution.

In the twentieth century, the building was secularized and became the Kariye Museum. Conservation undertaken with the Byzantine Institute of America and Dumbarton Oaks from 1948 into the 1950s uncovered, cleaned, and documented the mosaics and frescoes. Turkey redesignated the monument as a mosque in 2020, and it reopened for worship after restoration in 2024. Management now accommodates prayer while allowing access to much of the Christian decoration, with curtains or coverings used in worship areas at certain times.

Chora's significance lies in this long sequence rather than in a single frozen identity. Byzantine masonry, fourteenth-century imagery, Ottoman adaptations, modern conservation, and current religious use occupy the same monument. The mosaics are exceptional for their narrative range, spatial ingenuity, and emotional detail, but they also survive as repaired and incomplete surfaces. Reading the site carefully means recognizing both the Christian program commissioned by Metochites and the centuries of mosque use that preserved and reshaped the building within Istanbul's living urban fabric.