Leo held the rank of Protospatharios — leader of the spatharioi, the palace guards of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. He was also lord of the territory around ancient Orchomenus in Boeotia, and sometime around 873 he resolved to mark his ownership with something permanent. Four inscriptions carved into the church walls record his identity and intentions. He wanted the building to have, in the words of one epigram, a "resplendent, polished surround everywhere." Scholars believe the church may have been designed partly as a funerary monument — an unusual ambition in Byzantine Greece — which could explain its exceptional scale and the personal urgency that breathes through those stone proclamations. Why Leo chose this particular hilltop above Orchomenus is another question. The traveler Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, had already noted sanctuaries of the Graces and Dionysus in the area; they have never been found, but the ground had clearly been sacred long before Christianity arrived.

Walking around the exterior of the Dormition church today, you read it like a palimpsest. The ashlar courses are interrupted by column vertebrae turned sideways, by carved architectural fragments repurposed as decorative panels, by tombstone slabs pressed flat into the masonry. This technique — reusing ancient material, known as spolia — was common in early medieval church-building throughout the former Roman world. At Panagia Skripou it is more visible than almost anywhere else in Greece. The stones came from the ruins of Orchomenus, which had been an important Boeotian city and, long before that, a major Mycenaean power. Beneath the church's west precinct, excavators found Mycenaean-period foundations; inside the nave, traces of an early Christian mosaic were uncovered. The site had been layered with occupation for three thousand years before Leo set his workmen to build.

The Church of the Dormition measures 22.30 by 18.60 metres — without the narthex — making it the largest and most luxuriously finished known church of its type and era outside Constantinople. Its plan is an inscribed cruciform with a dome, protruding cross-arms, and a narrow western narthex. Scholars classify it as the most important example of the transitional cruciform type in Greece: the form in which the early Christian basilica was evolving toward the mature Middle Byzantine cross-in-square plan. The eastern end has three apses; the two side apses function not as the usual pastophoria but as chapels of Saints Peter and Paul, as an inscribed epigram explains — an unusual dedication that also hints at Leo's connections to Rome. The church name, Skripou, is thought to derive from the Latin word scriptus, meaning inscription, a reflection of its unusually text-rich walls.

The oldest surviving frescoes inside the church date to the twelfth century, painted long after Leo's death. Restoration work has continued since 1930, and in 1939 the bell tower to the northwest was constructed to plans from the Greek Ministry of Culture. Then, during a modern restoration campaign — while frescoes were being uncovered and sculptures cleaned — fire broke out and caused serious damage. Sandblasting cleared smoke from the interior in a first phase of repair; the restoration of window shutters and narthex frescoes awaited a second. Panagia Skripou functioned as a monastery for centuries; today it serves as a parish church for the town of Orchomenus. The community celebrates its patronal feast on August 15, the Dormition of the Theotokos, and again on September 10 — the day in 1943 when, according to local tradition, the Panagia protected the town and its people from German occupying forces who intended to destroy it.

Most medieval buildings have uncertain dates. Dendrochronology, documentary guesswork, stylistic analysis — historians piece together approximations. The church at Panagia Skripou is different. The inscription on the exterior of the sanctuary arch states the year of construction and the name of the man who paid for it, giving scholars an anchor to date the transitional cruciform church form with unusual precision. That single dated monument has allowed art historians to sequence other, undated Byzantine churches against it, making the Dormition of Orchomenus a kind of calibration point for an entire chapter of medieval architectural history. Leo's need to inscribe his name in stone four times over has turned out to be a gift to every scholar who came after him.