The Forum Bovis occupied a particular topographical niche in Constantinople's urban landscape: the valley of the Lycus creek, a small watercourse that ran through the historic peninsula, between what were designated the third and seventh hills of the city. The Mese, Constantinople's great ceremonial spine, had two branches in its western reaches, and the Forum of the Ox sat along the southern branch. Administratively, it fell within the eleventh Regio of the city. Its site corresponds today to the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul — a busy transport hub where several major roads converge, the descendants of the ancient routes that once funneled traffic toward the city's western gates. Nothing of the forum is visible at street level. The creek that gave the valley its name was long since channeled underground.

The bronze ox at the forum's center arrived from Pergamum, one of the great Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor, as part of the massive transfer of classical antiquities that Constantine and his successors organized to furnish their new capital. In its original context, the ox was likely a cultic or votive object. In Constantinople, it acquired an additional function: the brazen bull. The device worked by closing a condemned person inside the hollow bronze figure and then heating the metal from outside. The forum's sources document its use for executions, though they do not itemize the victims. The brazen bull was not a Byzantine invention — it appears in accounts of ancient Greek and Roman practice as well — but Constantinople gave it a permanent home in the middle of one of the city's major public squares, beside the workshops and warehouses that surrounded it in the sixth century.

During the Byzantine Iconoclasm — the eighth-century theological controversy over the veneration of religious images that convulsed the empire for generations — the Forum of the Ox became an execution ground for defenders of icon veneration. Saint Theodosia of Constantinople, who died in 729, and Saint Andrew of Crete, who died in 766, were both killed there. Their martyrdom at the forum connected the square to the broader story of Byzantine religious conflict, in which men and women willing to defend icons against imperial prohibition were executed in public spaces that were simultaneously markets and civic plazas. The forum had already burned once, in 562, when fire consumed it along with the warehouses and workshops that had grown up around it. The executions of the Iconoclast period came after that rebuilding, in a square that had already seen catastrophe.

Much of what we know about the Forum Bovis comes from an unlikely source: a ceremonial manual. The De Ceremoniis, written by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–959), recorded in meticulous detail the liturgical processions that moved through Constantinople each year from the Great Palace. Two of those processions — one directed toward the Church of Saint Mary of the Spring and one toward the Church of Saint Mocius — transited through the Forum of the Ox each year. The emperor's record-keeping, designed to preserve court ritual, also preserved the forum's location and function. Without it, the square's geography would be even harder to reconstruct.

The Forum of the Ox disappeared so thoroughly after the end of the Byzantine Empire that its precise location was uncertain for centuries. The answer came by accident. In 1956, during construction work for the new Millet and Vatan Caddesi roads — the large thoroughfares cut through the historic Istanbul peninsula to ease modern traffic — workers excavating outside the south wall of the Murat Pasha Mosque uncovered two stone pillars, each about two meters tall, with bases roughly 3 by 4 meters wide. The pillars likely belonged to a triumphal arch that once marked one of the forum's entrances. Individual architectural elements were also recovered in situ. Then, in 1968–71, roadworks for the Aksaray interchange — just southeast of the Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Mosque — found nothing at all. The forum had been erased not by deliberate destruction but by the quiet accumulation of centuries of building and rebuilding on the same ground.