Kariye Mosque: The Chora and Its Mosaics
Why is it significant?
Come into the little square and take in the building before you: a huddle of domes and brick walls, a slim minaret, wooden houses and cafés all around. This is the Kariye Mosque, once the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora.
Key Facts
| Place | Kariye Mosque: The Chora and Its Mosaics |
|---|---|
| Address | Kariye Camii Sokak No:18, Derviş Ali, 34087 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.03120, 28.93900 |
| Part of Walk | Neighbours of the Golden Horn: Fener, Balat and Istanbul's Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Bulgarian Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Come into the little square and take in the building before you: a huddle of domes and brick walls, a slim minaret, wooden houses and cafés all around. This is the Kariye Mosque, once the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora.
Chora means in the countryside, because the first monastery here stood outside Constantine's walls, among the fields, before the later Theodosian walls swept it into the city. Between around 1315 and 1321, Theodore Metochites, the most powerful and learned statesman of his day, rebuilt and decorated it. He covered it with mosaics and frescoes telling the lives of the Virgin and of Christ, one of the most complete picture cycles of late Byzantine art anywhere.
Above the door into the nave, Metochites himself kneels in a mosaic, wearing an enormous hat, offering a model of the church to Christ. And in the side chapel, the fresco of the Anastasis: Christ bursting the gates of hell and pulling Adam and Eve out of their tombs by the wrists, as if they weighed nothing at all. Seven hundred years old, and it still moves like a film.
Metochites fell from power in 1328, lost his fortune and was allowed back here as a monk, where he died among his own pictures in 1332. Around 1511 the church became a mosque, and its images were covered rather than destroyed. In the twentieth century it became a museum, and restorers of the Byzantine Institute of America uncovered the mosaics in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2020 a presidential decree made it a mosque again, and it reopened for prayer in May 2024. Visitors still come, now alongside worshippers.
So the walk ends with the question it began with: who does a building belong to? From Yavuz Selim's dome to the Patriarchate's shut gate, from an iron church to a ship-shaped synagogue and a spring under an Armenian altar, this corner of Istanbul has always been a city of many neighbours. Find a seat in one of the cafés, order a tea, and listen to the call to prayer drift over the Byzantine domes.