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The
Church of Hagios Demetrios, the earliest of the surviving churches of
Mystras, is the metropolitan church built in the second half of the 13th
century as a wooden-roofed basilica.

The metropolitan was erected by the metropolitan Eugenios (1262–72), who is depicted in the diakonikon,
where his tomb was also discovered. To his successor Theodosios
(1272–83?) are due a large portion of the wall paintings decorating the
church. Theodosios, who subscribed to a policy of reconciliation with
the papacy as promoted by Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, was
represented kneeling in prayer at the feet of the Virgin in the conch of
the sanctuary apse. However, his image was intentionally scraped off in
an act of damnatio memoriae by one of his successors, probably
Nikephoros Moschopoulos (1288?–1315), who was a follower of Andronikos
II’s policy against reconciliation. In the inscriptions he had carved in
the church Moschopoulos promoted himself as the church’s founder.
During his tenure the Metropolis flourished. It had a library and most
likely a scriptorium for copying manuscripts. He himself completed the
painted decoration of the church, with, among others, figures of the
apostles in the south aisle in the heavy or cubist manner of the end of
the thirteenth century.

Around 1310 he decorated
the narthex with scenes of the Second Coming and of the Ecumenical
Councils, among other works. These wall paintings follow a stylistic
trend in which the human form is represented with three-dimensionality
but without exaggeration, a trend visible in some of the most
outstanding monuments of Constantinople from the decade 1310–20, such as
the paintings in the chapel of the Pammakaristos Monastery and in the Chora Monastery.

In the first half of the
fifteenth century galleries were added to the Metropolis, which thus
took on the form of the Mystras type of church. According to a relief
inscription, this conversion was achieved under the metropolitan
Matthew. In the older literature the conversion was associated with the
supposed coronation of Constantine Palaiologos in the Metropolis in
1448/49, a hypothesis that does not appear to be supported by the
sources. The exterior wall paintings of the north portico, depicting
four deceased metropolitans of the fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, have also been associated with the changes brought about by
Matthew in the fifteenth century. Abbreviations of his name also appear
on the imposts of the proskynetaria of the templon, while the rest of
the marble sculptural elements of the templon date to around 1200 and
were reused, having originally come from an unknown church of the
southern Peloponnese.