Initial degenerations of flag varieties

We prove that the initial degenerations of the flag variety admit closed immersions into finite inverse limits of flag matroid strata, where the diagrams are derived from matroidal subdivisions of a suitable flag matroid polytope. As an application, we prove that the initial degenerations of ${\mathrm{F\ell }}^{\circ }(n)$ – the open subvariety of the complete flag variety $\mathrm{F\ell }(n)$ consisting of flags in general position – are smooth and irreducible when $n\le 4$. We also study the Chow quotient of $\mathrm{F\ell }(n)$ by the diagonal torus of $\mathrm{PGL}(n)$, and show that, for $n=4$, this is a log crepant resolution of its log canonical model.