A young Hindu girl sits for a ceremony where she and other girls are worshipped as “Kumari”, or living goddess, during Ram Navami festival, at a temple in Kolkata, India, Saturday, March 28, 2015. Ram Navami marks the birth of Hindu God Rama. (Photo by Bikas Das/AP Photo)

A man watches the huge waves which brakes at the Paseo Nuevo's promenade in San Sebastian, Basque Country, Spain on 11 January 2016 where the wind has reached to 90 km/h and have been registred waves of eight kilometres due to the bad weather. (Photo by Juan Herrero/EPA)

Alicia Vargas, 23, a performer from the Urus Diablada group, tied the laces of her boots before a practice ahead of Carnival in Oruro, Bolivia February 5, 2016. (Photo by David Mercado/Reuters)

A 20 metre high spiral staircase in a tower used as an emergency exit, is seen inside a Federal Reserve bank (Bundesbank) bunker, prior to the bunker's official opening to the public in Cochem, Germany, March 18, 2016. West Germany's Central Bank (Deutsche Bundesbank) stored some 20 billion German marks of emergency notes in two underground bunkers, one in Frankfurt the other in Cochem, between 1964-1988 during the cold war. (Photo by Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)

In this Thursday, March 17, 2016 photo, 33-year-old Palestinian clown doctor Alaa Miqdad, left, entertains 3-year-old patient Yaqin Shawaf, who suffers from dialysis, in the department of kidney diseases at Al-Rantisi children's hospital in Gaza City. (Photo by Adel Hana/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.

An Anti-Balaka fighter, member of a militia opposed to the Seleka rebel group, puts a knife to his throat showing what he would do to any Seleka, on the outskirts of the Boy-Rabe neighborhood in Bangui on December 14, 2013. France raised alarm on December 13 over worsening violence in the Central African Republic, as UN chief Ban Ki-moon urged warring Christians and Muslims to stop the bloodshed that has left more than 600 dead in the past week. (Photo by Ivan Lieman/AFP Photo)

In this photo taken Sunday, October 5, 2014, a library official shows a 13th-century German prayer book containing the earliest evidence of the Yiddish language, at Israel's National Library in Jerusalem. This week, Israel's National Library gave The Associated Press a rare peek at a selection of rare historical manuscripts in its collection. (Photo by Sebastian Scheiner/AP Photo)