Chora Museum (Kariye Museum)

The building was originally known as the Church of the Holy Saviour Outside the Walls (Chora literally means 'country'), reflecting the fact that when it was first built it was located outside the original city walls constructed by Constantine the Great.
What you see today isn't the original church. Instead, it was reconstructed at least five times, most significantly in the 11th, 12th and 14th centuries. Virtually all of the interior decoration – the famous mosaics and the less renowned but equally striking frescos – dates from circa 1320 and was funded by Theodore Metochites, a poet and man of letters who was logothetes, the official responsible for the Byzantine treasury, under Emperor Andronikos II (r 1282–1328). One of the museum's most wonderful mosaics, found above the door to the nave in the inner narthex, depicts Theodore offering the church to Christ.

It cost us about $10 (50 lira) to catch a cab from our hotel to the museum. The hotel arranged the cab. On the way back, I tried out the Uber app which was an interesting experience. It identified cabs with a number, but when we saw cabs, they had big numbers on the side of the car and that is what we were looking for. All the license plates started with the same number and we weren’t really paying attention to that. So one driver who claimed to be at our location, we never saw, even though he actually tried to call us (big fail in communication). Eventually, we figured out we needed to be looking at the plate number and a guy showed up. What was a bit spooky is that the Uber app didn’t tell us what it was going to cost, but since we were in a hurry to make it to the Final Dinner, we just said, oh who cares and jumped in. The guy seemed to be heading in the right direction (rather than driving us to an Isis encampment!), but as we neared the hotel, he got stuck in some nasty traffic and then didn’t seem to know where the hotel was (even though he had 2 GPS units running!). He even stopped once and leaned out and asked another cabbie where the hotel was. Finally, after driving around and around in the same vicinity, we finally begged him to stop and let us out, which he did. You could tell he felt bad and he only charged us 50 lira which turned out to be about $7 on our credit card. Of course once out of the cab my gps on the phone couldn’t get a signal (too many buildings), so although I knew we were close, I didn’t really have an idea which way to go, so we ducked into a cafe and asked the guy there who gave us the general direction. As we headed that way, as fortune would have it, we bumped into two folks from our tour group who knew where the hotel was and pointed us that way. An adventure!Read more