In this Friday, February 27, 2015 photo, an Israeli high-school senior preparing to join the Israeli military later this year participates in a privately run training camp for military combat fitness near Yakum, central Israel. With a mandatory three-year military service looming after graduation, teenage boys, and increasingly girls too, are gearing up for the draft, getting into shape and trying to improve their chances of acceptance into elite combat units. (Photo by Oded Balilty/AP Photo)

An aerial view shows the the Mountain Bike course at the X-Park at Deodoro Olympic Park ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 16, 2016. (Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)

At least 43 people have been killed and more than 200 others wounded in an attack by Somali Islamist militants on a Nairobi shopping mall, the Kenyan Red Cross said on Sunday. The Somali Islamist group al Shabaab claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack on the Kenyan capital’s Westgate mall, which is frequented by Westerners as well as Kenyans. Several foreigners, including a Canadian diplomat, were among the dead. Photo: Security officers secure an area inside the Westgate Shopping Centre. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

The zombies, cowgirls, and witches were out in force Saturday night on Clematis Street as thousands of people came to Moonfest to celebrate Halloween. They came from Broward County, Boynton Beach, Wellington, Port St. Lucie, and as far away as Germany and Sweden. Photo: Joe Smith, 60, Boca Raton. (Photo by Thomas Cordy/The Palm Beach Post)

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.

People wearing bear fur costumes dance during the annual bear ritual gathering in Comanesti, Romania, Friday, December 30, 2016. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, toured from house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil, in the present the tradition has moved to Romania's cities too, where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

A woman dressed up for Halloween travels on a Metro train in São Paulo, Brazil on October 30, 2017. (Photo by Cris Faga/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A reveller takes part in an annual block party known as “Ceu na Terra” (Heaven on Earth), during carnival festivities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil February 3, 2018. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)