Russian Baroque iconostasis in the neglected Assumption Cathedral of Rostov the Great

Another Baroque iconostasis, this time a Russian one, of the 1730s-1740s. Though in a very sorry state, even if the Dormition Cathedral of 1508 in Rostov the Great does belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. A church on this spot was already reckoned old in the 1100s, new cathedrals have been raised here more than once over a thousand years, this or that has been rebuilt, and restoration work in the cathedral church now seems to be under way, which is gratifying, provided, of course, that it is not fated to meet the same end as the church of the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem beneath its detached bell tower, "restored" in the early 2000s, where in the course of the repairs they hacked out new doorways and widened the originals and bricked them up 🤷🏽‍♂️ But in general it is not only now that the sight of such neglect sends a chill down the skin: the last two hundred years have not been kind to this majestic building. In the 1950s a hurricane tore off the domes, before that came the desolation that followed the Revolution, and in the nineteenth century, too, the cathedral was left to its fate quite thoroughly. It is a comfort that they did not pull it down.