An Egyptian Coptic Christian women holds onto a pew during the celebration of Christmas Nativity Liturgy, the start of Christmas, at the Coptic Orthodox Church of St. George on January 6, 2012 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Sister Rebecca Leis pours low-gluten alter bread batter into a machine that bakes the thin bread at the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration monastery in Clyde, Missouri, December 18, 2014. The Sisters have made communion wafers since 1910 and began making a low-gluten version in 2003 and have gone from 143 customers in 2004 to more than 11,000 customers from around the world. (Photo by Dave Kaup/Reuters)

A boy dressed as the Star Wars character Darth Vader attends a Star Wars themed church service, at the Zion Church in Berlin, Sunday, December 20, 2015. About 500 people, some carrying light saber props or wearing Darth Vader masks, attended the service, more than twice as many as usual on a Sunday. (Photo by Markus Schreiber/AP Photo)

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.

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.

A woman holds her dog as it is blessed by a priest in Benalmadena, near Malaga, Spain, January 17, 2016. Hundreds of pet owners bring their animals to be blessed every year on the day of San Anton, Spain's patron saint of animals. (Photo by Jon Nazca/Reuters)

A veterinarian kisses an 8-month-old cat, wearing a prosthetic two-wheel device, at a veterinary hospital in Chongqing municipality, March 16, 2015. The cat's rear legs lost the abilty to walk after falling from the ninth to fifth floor of a building last November, its since undergone four major surgeries which included removing parts of its organs, local media reported. (Photo by Reuters/China Daily)

In this January 7, 2016, photo, conservationists of Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation hold a baby orangutan rescued along with its mother during a rescue and release operation for orangutans trapped in a swath of jungle in Sungai Mangkutub, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Last year's forest fires drove orangutans closer to the river bank, where they had to live in an over-populated swath of forest as thin as 30 meters wide along the river. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)