The church was erected at the northern foot of Constantinople's sixth hill, in the neighborhood known as ta Karianou, on the inner side of the Wall of Heraclius. Its location was intimate with the Blachernae quarter — the imperial district where the later Byzantine emperors preferred to live, ringed by walls and close to the Golden Horn. The building sat less than a hundred meters west of the now-demolished Gate of Küçük Ayvansaray and east of the Gate of Blachernae, pressed between two great defensive barriers. Scholars have debated its dedication: an early theory proposed it was the church of Saint Thekla of the Palace of Blachernae, but the building lies too far from the Blachernae Palace itself for that identification to hold. Stylistically, the structure belongs to the Komnenian era — the middle or second half of the eleventh century — a period when Constantinople was rebuilding its confidence and its monuments. In plan it resembled a reduced version of the famous Chora Church, supported by arches carried on angular piers.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, during the Palaiologan era, the church received a renewed fresco cycle. These were the paintings that would make the building historically significant: images of Saints Eleuterus, Abercius, Polykarpos, Spyridon, Procopius, and Nicetas, some framed in painted medallions. Above the altar, the barrel vault bore a depiction of the Nativity of Jesus. The painters worked in the Palaiologan style — more humanistic, more emotionally expressive than the rigid Komnenian forms that preceded it — and the results were vivid enough that scholars were still tracking their existence in 1890. Then the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, and the church became a mosque, renamed for Toklu Ibrahim Dede, the custodian of a nearby türbe. Prayers replaced liturgy. The building changed use, but the frescoes remained behind whitewash or plaster, waiting.

In 1929 the owner of the building demolished nearly the entire structure, leaving only the south wall and the apse. It was an act of private demolition that cost the city an irreplaceable monument — and paradoxically revealed what it had hidden. With the walls gone, the fourteenth-century paintings came to light again for the first time since they had been covered. Scholars who had known of their existence from reports written in 1890 finally had access. The first systematic survey of the remains was not conducted until 1954. By then the south wall had been absorbed into the fabric of a residential building, the street around it renamed after the mosque that had occupied the site. The remaining brickwork still displays the Byzantine technique: courses of white stone alternating with red brick, half pillars dividing the external face, lesenes surmounted by arches. The apse endures.

Today, Toklu Ibrahim Dede Sokak is a quiet residential lane a short walk from the Golden Horn shore in the Ayvansaray neighborhood of Fatih. The land boundary here is ancient: you are standing at the junction of the Blachernae wall and what remains of the Golden Horn walls, the point where two great arms of Constantinople's defenses once met. The nearby Atik Mustafa Pasha Mosque — itself originally a Byzantine church — gives a sense of what this neighborhood once was: a dense cluster of Christian sacred space converted into Ottoman use across several centuries. The Toklu Dede remnant is less visible than its neighbor, having been reduced to a single wall and almost entirely enclosed. But for those who know where to look, the alternating stripes of stone and brick announce themselves unmistakably. This is what Byzantine Constantinople looked like in a residential street, nine centuries ago.