A woman is helped with adorning her hair with jewelry, part of the traditional clothing known as “Pollera”, before the annual Thousand Polleras parade in Las Tablas, in the province of Los Santos January 10, 2015. According to local residents, the Pollera dates back to the 18th century and was worn by the Spanish lower classes. Today, it has become the Panamanian national costume. The dress is made entirely by hand and the jewellery worn is pure gold and worth thousands of dollars. (Photo by Carlos Jasso/Reuters)

A woman in traditional clothes wears a pin showing North Korea's founder Kim Il-sung (L) and former leader Kim Jong-il, on her dress as she welcomes foreign reporters to a temple during a government organised tour just outside Pyongyang October 8, 2015. North Korea is getting ready to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of its ruling Workers' Party of Korea on October 10. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A mannequin's head is covered in a woman dress shop in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, December 26, 2022. Under the Taliban, the mannequins in women's dress shops across the Afghan capital Kabul are a haunting sight, their heads cloaked in cloth sacks or wrapped in black plastic bags. The hooded mannequins are one symbol of the Taliban's puritanical rule over Afghanistan. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is seen in an aerial view on February 20, 2014 in the Mojave Desert in California near Primm, Nevada. The largest solar thermal power-tower system in the world, owned by NRG Energy, Google and BrightSource Energy, opened last week in the Ivanpah Dry Lake and uses 347,000 computer-controlled mirrors to focus sunlight onto boilers on top of three 459-foot towers, where water is heated to produce steam to power turbines providing power to more than 140,000 California homes. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

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.