It lies on Tevkii Cafer Mektebi Sokak, at the summit of a slope overlooking the Golden Horn, and near the imposing building of the Phanar Greek Orthodox College.

At the beginning of the 7th century, Princess Sopatra (daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Maurikios), and her friend Eustolia built a nunnery on the slope of the fifth hill of Constantinople.

In 1261, after the reconquest of the city by the Byzantines, Isaac Doukas, father-in-law of George Acropolites and maternal uncle of Michael VIII Palaiologos, rebuilt a simple, one-storey monastery, dedicated to the Theotokos Panaghiotissa.

[3] In 1281, Maria Palaiologina, illegitimate daughter of Emperor Michael VIII and widow of Abaqa, Khan of the Mongolian Ilkhanate, returned to Constantinople after an absence of 15 years.

She is said to have rebuilt the nunnery and the church (which then assumed the shape still seen today), deserving the title of Ktētorissa ("foundress") of that complex, and retired there until her death.

[5] Tradition holds that Sultan Mehmed II endowed the church to the mother of Christodoulos, the Greek architect of the mosque of Fatih, in acknowledgment of his work.

The grant was confirmed by Bayazid II, in recognition of the services of the nephew of Christodoulos, who built the mosque bearing that sultan's name.

It has, or originally had, a tetraconch plan with a central dome enclosed by a tower, which renders it a unicum in the Byzantine architecture of Constantinople and, on a much smaller scale surprisingly anticipates those of many great Ottoman mosques.