Wakaba Higuchi of Japan skates during the Women Single Skating Short Program on day eleven of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at Capital Indoor Stadium on February 15, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Japan's Satoko Yamada prepares to compete during the Shooting 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team bronze medal match against South Korea for the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, Saturday, September 30, 2023. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Mareya Wae U Seng of Thailand performs during Individual qualification and Individual team final subdivision 2 of Rhythmic Gymnastics final at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, Friday, October 6, 2023. (Photo by Eugene Hoshiko/AP Photo)

Chinese honor guards prepare for the arrival of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Wednesday, June 14, 2023. (Photo by Jade Gao/Pool Photo via AP Photo)

Filipino typhoon victims walk through heavy mud in the typhoon hit town of Taft, Samar island, Philippines, 08 December 2014. Typhoon Hagupit weakened into a tropical storm as it moved towards the Philippine capital after killing at least 27 people and displacing more than one million people in the eastern and central provinces. Hagupit slammed into the country's eastern coast on 06 December evening, bringing heavy rains and gale-force winds that flattened homes, ripped off roofs, and knocked out power and communications. (Photo by Francis R. Malasig/EPA)

Abdulahi Yaroow, 13, smokes a cigarette while chewing khat at the same time in Mogadishu August 10, 2014. Grown on plantations in the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, tonnes of khat, or qat, dubbed “the flower of paradise” by its users, are flown daily into Mogadishu airport, to be distributed from there in convoys of lorries to markets across Somalia. Britain, whose large ethnic Somali community sustained a lucrative demand for the leaves, banned khat from July as an illegal drug. This prohibition jolted the khat market, creating a supply glut in Somalia and pushing down prices, to the delight of the many connoisseurs of its amphetamine-like high. (Photo by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

Mangli Munda poses on her wedding day with a stray dog in Jharkhand, India on August 30, 2014. An 18-year-old Indian girl has married a stray dog as a part of a tribal ritual designed to ward off an evil spell. Village elders hastily organised the wedding between Mangli Munda and the canine as the teenager is believed to be bringing bad luck to her community in a remote village in Jharkhand state. Mangli's father Sri Amnmunda agreed and even found a stray dog named Sheru as a match for his daughter. And while Mangli was a hesitant bride, she believes that the ceremony will help ensure that her future human husband will have a long life. (Photo by Barcroft Media/ABACAPress)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.