St Petersburg's Troitsky Cathedral in flames

The 1828 Vasily Stasov cathedral, built for the Izmailovsky regiment
and used till today to house the military uniforms of past Tsars,
caught fire during restoration efforts late Friday afternoon. Here's
the latest I can find - it looks like a total loss, given the
inaccessibility of the big central dome where the fire started, but it
sounds like most or all of the building's religious art and other
valuable items were removed:

Francois R. Velde...

I only saw it from a distance, but although the central dome seemed to be gone,
the four smaller domes were intact, so I don't think it's a "total loss".

atsarisborn...

Slightly OT:

Can anyone explain why "cathedral" in the West refers only to a church
containing a bishop's throne ("cathedra"), and that therefore there is
only one per bishop, while "cathedral" in Orthodox Russia appears to
refer to just about any large church? They can't all have bishops --

edespalais...

In former time there was here a correspondent from St. Petersbourg

that would make something like 20 for the Kremlin alone. Is it a
mistranslation, or is there no limit to the number of thrones an
Orthodox bishop may possess in any one see?

Joseph McMillan...

Actually, there are a number of Western dioceses in which one bishop
has more than one cathedral (co-cathedrals). Sometimes two dioceses
have been merged and both the cathedrals are kept in service; sometimes
the main seat of the bishop has moved from an ancient ecclesiastical
center to a major urban area, as in the case of Pope Benedict's former
see of Munich and Freising--there's still a cathedral at Freising as
well as one at Munich.

But I agree that the conventional translation of the Russian word
"sobor" as "cathedral" seems to be not completely accurate. The basic
meaning of "sobor" is council, gathering, congregation, assembly,
synod--etymologically it has nothing to do with a bishop's seat.
However, I'm not sure on what basis a Russian church is called a sobor
rather than something else. It isn't size, as the largest church in
Russia, Christ the Saviour in Moscow, is not a sobor but a khram (Khram
Khrista Spasitel'ya). Perhaps a sobor is a church that is home to a
synod, or one that is governed by something similar to a cathedral
chapter?

(BTW, I think there are only four sobors in the Kremlin, but may be
mistaken--I recall Dormition, Annunciation, Archangel, and Twelve
Apostles. Are there more?)

Joseph McMillan

Jean Coeur de Lapin