That is how the term is used by Simeon Metaphrastes[507] in his
description of the site of the monastery in his day, and that is how
the Anonymus[508] of the eleventh century and his follower Codinus[509]
understand the term; for they take special care to explain how a
building which lay within the city in their day could be styled 'Chora';
because, say they, it once stood without the walls, on territory,
therefore, called by the Byzantines, [Greek: chorion], the country. The
literal meaning of a word is earlier than its artificial and poetical
signification. And one can easily conceive how, when the style Chora was
no longer literally correct, men abandoned the sober ground of
common-sense and history to invent recondite meanings inspired by
imagination and sentiment.

This conclusion is confirmed by the history of the Chora given in the
Life of S. Theodore,[510] an abbot of the monastery, which Mr. Gedeon
discovered in the library of the Pantokrator on Mount Athos. According
to that biography, S. Theodore was a relative of Theodora, the wife of
Justinian the Great, and after serving with distinction in the Persian
wars, and winning greater renown as a monk near Antioch, came to
Constantinople about the year 530, at the invitation of his imperial
relatives, to assist in the settlement of the theological controversies
of the day. Once there he was induced to make the capital his permanent
abode by permission to build a monastery, where he could follow his high
calling as fully as in his Syrian retreat. For that purpose he selected
a site on the property of a certain Charisius, situated, as the Chora
is, on the slope of a hill, descending on the one hand steeply to the
sea, and rising, on the other, to the highest point in the line of the
Theodosian walls, the point marked by the gate named after Charisius
(now Edirne Kapoussi). The site was already hallowed, says the
biographer of S. Theodore, by the presence of a humble monastic retreat
and a small chapel.

The edifice erected by S. Theodore was, however, soon overthrown by the
severe earthquake which shook the city in 558, and all the hopes of the
good man would also have been dashed to the ground had the disaster not
called forth the sympathy and aid of Justinian. In the room of the
ruined buildings the emperor erected a magnificent establishment, with
chapels dedicated to the Theotokos, the Archangel Michael, S. Anthimus
of Nicomedia, and the Forty Martyrs of Seb