Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (L) shakes hands with Skype CEO Tony Bates during a news conference on May 10, 2011 in San Francisco, California. Microsoft has agreed to buy Skype for $8.5 billion. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Interior designer Tony Alleyne stands in his «Star Trek» theme studio apartment May 16, 2003 in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England. The apartment took nearly 10 years to redesign in the style of the «Star Trek» Starship Enterprise on approximately US$1.7 million. (Photo by Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)

Finia, a visiting student from Hanover, cools off under a water sprinkler in front of the Chancellery on June 10, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Dancers of the English National Ballet perform “Strictly Gershwin” at the Coliseum on January 10, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

A dog and its owner perform a routine in the main arena on Day three of Crufts at the Birmingham NEC Arena on March 10, 2012 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Alexander Levine crosses the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge during the marathon in New York on November 3, 2024. (Photo by Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

This handout photo taken and released on August 1, 2025 by Indonesia's Geological Agency shows Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki spewing lava and volcanic ash up to approximately 10 kilometres high during its eruption as observed from the monitoring post in East Flores, in East Nusa Tenggara province. A volcano in eastern Indonesia erupted on August 1, belching an ash tower 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) into the sky, the country's volcanology agency said, weeks after another huge eruption triggered dozens of flight cancellations to and from Bali. (Photo by Indonesia's Geological Agency/AFP 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.