[1][2] The interior of the building is covered with some of the finest surviving Byzantine Christian mosaics and frescoes, which were left in plain sight during Muslim worship throughout much of the Ottoman era.

The Chora Church was originally built in the early 4th century as part of a monastery complex outside the city walls of Constantinople erected by Constantine the Great, to the south of the Golden Horn.

However, when Theodosius II built his formidable land walls in 413–414, the church became incorporated within the city's defences, but retained the name Chora (for the presumed symbolism of the name see below).

The majority of the fabric of the current building dates from 1077–1081, when Maria Doukaina, the mother-in-law of Alexius I Comnenus, rebuilt the Chora Church as an inscribed cross or quincunx: a popular architectural style of the time.

In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the monastery was home to the scholar Maximus Planudes, who was responsible for the restoration and reintroduction of Ptolemy's Geography to the Byzantines and, ultimately, to Renaissance Italy.

During the last siege of Constantinople in 1453, the Icon of the Theotokos Hodegetria, considered the protector of the City, was brought to Chora in order to assist the defenders against the assault of the Ottomans.

[6] Around fifty years after the fall of the city to the Ottomans, Hadım Ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Sultan Bayezid II, ordered the Chora Church to be converted into a mosque — Kariye Camii.

In 2005, the Association of Permanent Foundations and Service to Historical Artifacts and Environment filed a lawsuit to challenge the status of the Chora Church as a museum.

[9] In November 2019, the Turkish Council of State, Turkey's highest administrative court, ordered that it was to be reconverted to a mosque.

The parecclesion is covered in frescoes that emphasize the theological message of salvation, in keeping with the space's use as a funerary chapel.

[5] Within the Christian worldview, God raises the dead at the end of time, hence the significance of the Anastasis and Last Judgement scenes painted prominently on the ceiling.

Along the walls of the Chora's parecclesion are arcosolia, arched recesses for tombs, likely intended for Theodore Metochites and his family.

Literally translated, the church's full name was the Church of the Holy Saviour in the Country (Greek: ἡ Ἐκκλησία τοῦ Ἁγίου Σωτῆρος ἐν τῇ Χώρᾳ, hē Ekklēsia tou Hagiou Sōtēros en tēi Chōrāi).

The name must have carried symbolic meaning, as the mosaics in the narthex describe Christ as the Land of the Living (ἡ Χώρα τῶν ζώντων, hē Chōra tōn zōntōn) and Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Container of the Uncontainable (ἡ Χώρα τοῦ Ἀχωρήτου, hē Chōra tou Achōrētou).