Dressed up participants run at the “Course de la Marmite” during the 46th Escalade Race (Course de l'Escalade) in Geneva, Switzerland, 07 December 2024. (Photo by Martial Trezzini/EPA/EFE)

Manchester City's Phil Foden takes a corner kick in a match against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park in London on March 11, 2023. (Photo by John Sibley/Action Images via Reuters)

Keen diver Yusuke Fukami fulfilled a personal dream by snapping a cartoon-like Costasiella sea slug while in Bali in the last decade of December 2024. (Photo by Yusuke Fukami/South West News Service)

In this November 16, 2018, file photo, Duane Townsend, left, shoots a pheasant at Special Friday Pheasant Hunts, sponsored by Southern Tulare County Sportsman's Association, at Lake Success Recreation Area in Porterville, Calif. A Utah man who has been in a wheelchair for more than three decades has created a pheasant hunt for people like him who need help getting into the outdoors. The Daily Herald in Provo reports that Clint Robinson broke his neck after being thrown off a horse at a rodeo 32 years ago. The event called “Wheelchairs in the Wild” pairs people that have physical disabilities with hunters who help them with whatever they need. Many go in off-road vehicles. (Photo by Chieko Hara/The Porterville Recorder via AP Photo/File)

People wearing face masks walk through Ginza area on December 27, 2020 in Tokyo, Japan. Japan announced it will close its borders to non-resident foreign nationals from tomorrow until the end of January after two people were discovered to be infected with a new strain of Covid-19 coronavirus that has begun spreading around the world. The country is also grappling with a surge in coronavirus infections, with Tokyo reporting 708 cases today. To date, Japan has recorded 218,453 infections, 3,052 deaths and 3,052 recoveries from the virus. (Photo by Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images)

A picture taken on April 27, 2021, shows the electrical wires running between homes in the capital Baghdad's Murabaa neighbourhood. Between January and March alone, the interior ministry recorded 7,000 fires, the deadliest of which erupted on Sunday in a Covid-19 hospital in Baghdad. Eighty-two people died and 100 others were injured in the inferno, which sparked shock and outrage in the country. Baghdad, a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, has the tragic distinction of being the Iraqi city hit by the most fires every year. (Photo by Sabah Arar/AFP Photo)

People enjoy themselves as they dance to Dominican music at a refugee camp for Haitians returning from the Dominican Republic on the outskirts of Anse-a-Pitres, Haiti, September 6, 2015. Dominican officials last month began implementing a controversial immigration program targeting Haitian migrants and Dominican-born people of Haitian descent. The program centers on round-ups and deportations that have triggered concerns about a slow-growing border migration crisis in the poorest country in the Americas. So far about 1,500 people have been deported at a pace of 50 to 100 per day, according to relief officials with access to records supplied by the Dominican government. (Photo by Andres Martinez Casares/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.