The name Parigoritissa means 'the Consoler' — a title of the Virgin Mary, and a name that carries a particular weight in the context of a city absorbing refugee scholars, artists, and clergy driven west by the Latin conquest of Constantinople. Arta was the capital of the Despotate of Epirus, one of the Byzantine successor states that emerged after the Fourth Crusade shattered the empire in 1204. The church was founded around 1250 by the Despot Michael II Komnenos Doukas, or someone in his court, as the metropolitan church of the city. It was damaged at some point — the exact circumstances are unrecorded — and then substantially restored and enlarged between 1290 and the end of the 13th century by Michael II's son and successor, Nikephoros I Komnenos Doukas, together with his second wife Anna Kantakouzene.

The building is almost square in plan, three storeys tall, and belongs to the octagonal type of Byzantine church — a form in which the central dome rests not on the walls but on piers arranged in a ring. What makes the Parigoritissa unusual is the structural ambition of those piers. They are divided into three tiers, each stepping inward, with the dome's weight distributed through brackets and cantilevers in a way that strikes visitors as daring even today. Four smaller domes rise at the corners of the flat roof, and a lantern crowns the whole composition. The exterior gives little hint of what is inside. Entering, the geometry of the dome's support suddenly becomes visible and the space opens upward in a way that early Byzantine architects rarely attempted at this scale.

Marble revetment — thin slabs of patterned stone fitted to the walls — covers the lower levels of the interior up to the gallery floor. Above the marble, frescoes and mosaics take over. On the dome, the Pantokrator mosaic surveys the space below, surrounded by angels and twelve prophets arranged between the drum's windows. Scholars believe these mosaics were executed by artists brought from outside Epirus — possibly Constantinople, though attribution is uncertain. In the altar, 16th-century frescoes by a painter named Ananias have survived. Elsewhere, 17th-century painting covers earlier layers. The sculptural program also betrays Western influence: Romanesque monsters appear in the carving alongside Biblical relief scenes, a reminder that the Despotate of Epirus was not isolated from Latin artistic currents even as it defined itself against Latin political power.

When the Despotate of Epirus fell to the Ottomans in 1449, the church entered a long period of diminishment. At some point it became bankrupt and was absorbed as a dependency (a metochion) of the nearby Monastery of Kato Panagia. By 1578 it is recorded as a female convent — a far cry from its original role as the metropolitan church of a ruling dynasty. The Ottomans, who had their own places of worship in Arta, did not destroy it; the Parigoritissa survived the Ottoman centuries in a reduced but intact condition. Modern restoration and archaeological attention came much later. For some years, part of the building housed the Archaeological Collection of Arta, giving its medieval galleries a second life as a repository for the region's ancient and Byzantine past.

The Parigoritissa stands near the center of the old city, a few minutes' walk from the castle on its hill to the northeast. The building reads differently from the outside and the inside: from the street, it is a solid, slightly austere three-storey mass of dressed stone, not obviously distinguished from other Byzantine churches of its era. It is only inside, looking up at the cantilevered piers and the golden figure in the dome, that the ambition of what was built here becomes clear. Aktion National Airport (LGPZ) lies about 40 kilometers to the southwest across the Gulf of Ambracia. From the air, Arta's old core is compact and visible; the church's flat roof with its central dome and four corner domes is one of the distinguishing marks of the historic center.