Tom Kaulitz and Heidi Klum attend Heidi Klum's 20th Annual Halloween Party presented by Amazon Prime Video and SVEDKA Vodka at Cathédrale New York on October 31, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for SVEDKA)

Youtubers wearing masks of pigs film a video at a shopping district which has fewer people than usually amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Tokyo, Japan, May 19, 2020. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

American singer-songwriter and actress Olivia Rodrigo accepts the Song of the Year award for “Drivers License” onstage during the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards at Barclays Center on September 12, 2021 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

Gisele Marie, a Muslim woman and professional heavy metal musician, holds her Gibson Flying V electric guitar as walks down stairs at the end of a fund raising concert for the Syrian refugees in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro November 8, 2015. Based in Sao Paulo, Marie, 42, is the granddaughter of German Catholics, and converted to Islam several months after her father passed away in 2009. Marie, who wears the burka, has been fronting her brothers' heavy metal band "Spectrus" since 2012. (Photo by Nacho Doce/Reuters)

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.

To mark World Water Day, on March 22nd Solidarités International and its agency BDDP Unlimited will roll out a campaign to build awareness of the scourge of undrinkable water.

These photos and video were taken in the Russian city of Astrakhan on the evening of June 7th, 2012. (Photo by Maxim Korotshenko)