U.S. Capitol Police with guns drawn stand near a barricaded door as protesters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, in Washington. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP Photo)

Model Heidi Klum attends her 8th Annual Halloween Party at The Green Door on October 31, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/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.

Tiffany Noreuil at the Oregon Humane Society in Portland, Oregon, holds feline Hercules, a 20-pound stray whose girth got him stuck in a pet door while trying to plunder some dog food. (Photo by AP Photo)

See also: Large People

An ice covered entrance door to the international gene bank Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, Norway, October 20, 2015. Two consignments of crop seeds will be deposited next year in a “doomsday vault” built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global supplies. The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds, such as beans, rice and wheat against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease. (Photo by Anna Filipova/Reuters)

A sloth peeks out from behind a door on a floating house in the “Lago do Janauari” near Manaus, Brazil, Tuesday, May 20, 2014. Manaus is one of the host cities for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. (Photo by Felipe Dana/AP Photo)

A showgirl in a face mask stands by the door at the reopening of Bally's Las Vegas hotel and casino, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Las Vegas. The casino reopened for the first time since March following a closure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. (Photo by John Locher/AP Photo)

The Soulton Long Barrow in Shropshire, UK on January 5, 2025. The main chamber is aligned so that at winter solstice and for a few weeks after, the sun sets directly through the stained glass door, resulting in a beautifuil rainbow of light to flood through the chamber. (Photo by Andrew Fusek Peters/South West News Service)