A woman takes photos of a child on a sports ground covered with hailstones following a hail storm in the Siberian city of Omsk, Russia on June 27, 2023. (Photo by Alexey Malgavko/Reuters)

Dancers perform during the closing ceremony of the 19th Asian Games at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium on October 8, 2023 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. (Photo by Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

The former Golf Channel and Fox Sports host, golf influencer Holly Sonders is seen on November 18, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by joce zerojack/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

In this Wednesday, August 21, 1991 file photo, appreciative muscovites hand bread, sausages and flowers to a Soviet tank's driver who helped stop the failed hardline coup in Moscow, Russia. When a group of top Communist officials ousted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago and flooded Moscow with tanks, the world held its breath, fearing a rollback on liberal reforms and a return to the Cold War confrontation. But the August 1991 coup collapsed in just three days, precipitating the breakup of the Soviet Union that plotters said they were trying to prevent. (Photo by Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo/File)

Piper Hoppe, 10, from Minnetonka, Minnesota, holds a sign at the doorway of River Bluff Dental clinic in protest against the killing of a famous lion in Zimbabwe, in Bloomington, Minnesota July 29, 2015. A Zimbabwean court on Wednesday charged a professional local hunter Theo Bronkhorst with failing to prevent an American from unlawfully killing “Cecil”, the southern African country's best-known lion. The American, Walter James Palmer, a Minnesota dentist who paid $50,000 to kill the lion, has left Zimbabwe. He says he did kill the animal but believed the hunt was legal and that the necessary permits had been issued. (Photo by Eric Miller/Reuters)

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.

Vitali Klitschko of Ukraine poses in front of Odlanier Solis of Cuba during the weigh in at Sport Karstadt on March 18, 2011 in Cologne, Germany. The WBC World Championship Heavyweight fight between Vitali Klitschko of Ukraine and Odlanier Solis of Cuba will be held on 19 March 2011.

Los Angeles Rams cheerleaders celebrate on the field with the confetti after the Rams 20-17 victory over the San Francisco 49ers in a NFC championship football game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Sunday, January 30, 2022. (Photo by Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports)