When I asked a boy on his way home from school where the Kariye Museum was, all the kids in earshot piped up in unison: Just ahead, on the left. When I made that left, I was completely bowled over. A charming tea garden, a clutch of shops selling touristic items, historical mansions newly restored, a restaurant offering variations on Ottoman Palace cuisine, and the Kariye Museum, a few tourists gathered around its door. Everything is like an architect's scale-model. The museum is quite modest-bare and unadorned. Taking a glance around, I enter the museum and am further astonished. For the interior of the Kariye, which appears so plain on the outside, is brilliantly colorful and impressive. The church, which was built as a monastery over the ruins of a chapel by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 536, suffered severe damage at the hands of the 'iconoclasts' in the 8th century. The temple, whose church portion underwent an architectural transformation when restored in the 11th century by Maria Doukaina, mother-in-law of Emperor Alexius I, was unfortunately unable to escape a further round of looting during the Latin occupation of Istanbul at the time of the Crusades.