Pammakaristos Church
— — the gold that survived the centuries.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Byzantine church on the fifth hill of old Constantinople, holding onto a side chapel of fourteenth-century mosaics that almost nothing else in the city kept. The main building has been a mosque since 1591, called Fethiye Camii. The parekklesion next door is the museum, and it is where the gold ground still catches what light comes through the narrow windows. Visitors come up the slope from the Golden Horn and stand for a long time without speaking. from the studio
Pammakaristos Church, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Pammakaristos Church sits on the fifth hill of historic Constantinople, in the Çarşamba quarter of the Fatih district, looking down toward the Golden Horn. The main church dates to the late eleventh or early twelfth century under the Komnenian dynasty, with a smaller side chapel, the parekklesion, added around 1310 by Maria Doukaina Palaiologina as a funerary chapel for her husband Michael Glabas. After the Ottoman conquest the building served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate from 1456 until 1587, then was converted to a mosque in 1591 by Murad III and renamed Fethiye Camii.
The exterior is recessed brick and stone in the Komnenian banded technique, with blind arches and a small dome. The parekklesion holds the surviving treasure: a deesis in the apse, a Pantokrator ringed by twelve prophets in the dome, and named saints across the vaults. The mosaics were uncovered between 1949 and 1960 by the Byzantine Institute of America under Paul Underwood, working alongside the team that cleaned the Chora. Since 1949 the parekklesion has been a museum administered with the wider monuments of the Fatih district, while the main hall remains an active mosque.
The parekklesion museum keeps short hours and is reached on foot from the Fener and Balat neighborhoods along the Golden Horn, about a fifteen-minute uphill walk from the ferry stop. The main mosque is open between prayer times. Photography is permitted in the museum but flashes are not, and the small interior holds at most twenty visitors at once before it feels crowded. The site is roughly four kilometers northwest of Hagia Sophia and is often paired with a visit to the Chora, which sits another two kilometers further along the old land walls.