SAINT-SAUVEUR-IN-CHORA (KARIYE CAMII)
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Come to admire sumptuous mosaics, in this former Byzantine church, which was a museum to become today a mosque.
Small in size but simply grand - the most beautiful Byzantine mosaics in Istanbul can be seen in the Kariye Museum. These fabulous mosaics and frescoes depict the lives of Jesus and Mary, various saints of the Church, but what remains most interesting is the pictorial narration of the life of Mary and the Apocryphal Gospels. They constitute today one of the most beautiful artistic ensembles of the Byzantine world. The mosaics date mainly from 1315 to 1321. The three cycles developed in the frescoes and mosaics (the Virgin, Christ and the symbolism of the parecclion) are unique in their kind. There are three hundred scenes or isolated figures, including 66 portraits on the genealogy of Christ, and about twenty works on the life of the Virgin. The word chora may have a deeper meaning than the word "field", which was given to it only because of the church's off-centre location. Indeed, one of the images of Christ is accompanied by the inscription I chora ton zoton ("the land of the living", "field" of eternal life). Following the conquest of Constantinople, the building was converted into a mosque. The frescoes and mosaics were plastered over and waited for several centuries for restoration by the American Institute of Byzantine Studies. It was in 1945 that the Republic of Turkey made it a museum, and since 2019, under the presidency of Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, it has become a mosque again.
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