When Alfonso VI of Leon reconquered Toledo in 1085, the victors did not demolish what they found. The city's mosques were repurposed as Christian churches with minimal alteration - a pragmatic decision that preserved Islamic architecture throughout the medieval city. Santo Tome was founded on the site of an 11th-century mosque, first mentioned in documents from the 12th century. By the early 14th century the structure had deteriorated badly, and Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, Lord of Orgaz, financed a complete rebuild. The mosque's minaret was not torn down but transformed into a bell tower in the Mudejar style - that distinctively Spanish fusion of Islamic craftsmanship and Christian purpose. Square in plan, the tower features masonry and brick inlaid with glazed ceramics, with groups of two and three arched windows and a frieze of blind archery with lobed arches. Embedded in its second floor is a Visigothic marble plaque bearing a cross flanked by Alpha and Omega symbols, a fragment from an even older past.

Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo died in 1323 and requested burial in the church he had restored. According to legend, when his body was being lowered into the grave, Saints Stephen and Augustine appeared and placed him in his tomb with their own hands. The miracle became the church's central story. Two and a half centuries later, in 1586, the parish priest Andres Nunez de Toledo commissioned El Greco to paint the scene for the Chapel of the Conception, where the burial had taken place. El Greco delivered a work that divides cleanly into two registers: the earthly scene below, where black-clad Spanish noblemen witness the saints' intervention, and the heavenly scene above, where Christ and the Virgin preside over a swirl of angels and the blessed. The painting was fitted into an arch on the chapel wall, above a black marble gravestone inscribed in Latin and gold with the account of the miracle.

Step back from the famous painting and the church itself reveals Toledo's layered history. The building consists of three naves with a crossing, covered by barrel vaults and a polygonal apse. The Lord of Orgaz demolished the original head of the mosque-church and raised a central dome shaped like a Rub el Hizb - an eight-pointed star drawn from Islamic geometric tradition - with painted ribs. The chapel contains Baroque reredos, a Plateresque altarpiece, and a 12th-century image of the Virgin Mary. The greater chapel holds an altarpiece with Ionic elements from the 19th century, replacing an earlier Churrigueresque one, with a central painting of The Unbelief of St. Thomas by Vicente Lopez Portana. A 16th-century baptismal font rounds out a collection that spans Islamic geometry, medieval Mudejar craft, Renaissance painting, and Baroque ornament within a single parish church.

The exterior tower deserves attention beyond its beauty. Based on the Iglesia de San Roman elsewhere in Toledo, it represents the Toledan Mudejar tradition at its finest. Between the two upper bell-tower levels, a frieze of blind arches with lobulated forms rests on small columns of glazed clay. The sawtooth crowning at the top is a signature detail. The tower tells a story of coexistence and adaptation - Islamic builders working for Christian patrons, using techniques refined over centuries to create something that belongs fully to neither tradition and wholly to Toledo. The church opens daily so visitors can see the painting. Most spend their time in the Chapel of the Conception, transfixed by El Greco's vision. But those who look up at the tower before entering, or pause in the nave between the barrel vaults, find a different kind of masterpiece - one built not by a single genius but by centuries of exchange between cultures that shared the same streets.