A man helps a woman through a flooded neighbourhood in the aftermath of Cyclone Kenneth, in Pemba, Mozambique, April 28, 2019. (Photo by Mike Hutchings/Reuters)

Men push a car stucking in the mud on a motorway in Nimba County, Liberia, 28 July 2019. Most highway roads in the rural parts of the country are unpaved. The government of President George Weah has promised to build roads to connect all big cites of Liberia. (Photo by Ahmed Jallanzo/EPA/EFE)

Members of the Turkana community work unblocking an irrigation canal to provide water to their sorghum crops in an arid dry area in Nanyee, near Lodwar, Turkana County, Kenya, on October 1, 2019. Turkana is a vast, dry area in the north-west of Kenya that is on the frontline of climate change. With regular searing temperatures the Turkana people are suffering from recurring and prolonged droughts. (Photo by Luis Tato/AFP Photo)

A soldier supporting anti-government opposition groups carries a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on a street in the Fagah area of Mogadishu, Somalia Sunday, April 25, 2021. Gunfire was exchanged Sunday between government forces loyal to President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, who signed into law on April 14 a two year extension of his mandate and that of his government, and other sections of the military opposed to the move and sympathetic to former presidents Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. (Photo by Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP Photo)

Opposition supporters carry stones and chant slogans demanding lower taxes and a reduced cost of living in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 20, 2023. Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga called on his supporters to participate in countrywide protests on March 20, 2023 to demand that President William Ruto lowers the cost of living while questioning last year's presidential elections results. Kenyans face economic hardship following the government's recent tax measures and increased food and fuel prices. (Photo by Luis Tato/AFP Photo)

A picture released by the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows Kim Jong-un convening an urgent operation meeting at 0:30 am on March 29, 2013 at an undisclosed location, in which he ordered strategic rocket forces to be on standby to strike US and South Korean targets at any time. (Photo by KCNA via EPA)

North Korean soldiers look at South Korea across the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), on December 22, 2011 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/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.