A participant holds balloons before the Annual March against Homophobia and Transphobia in Havana, May 14, 2016. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Audrey Tautou attends “La Delicatesse” Paris Premiere on December 13, 2011 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

English television personality Gabby Allen attends the 2025 BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises at The Royal Festival Hall on May 11, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by James Curley)

Malena, 7, looks at Belgian clown Lili Bellule at the pediatric department of the Hopital Erasme at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in Brussels January 27, 2015. The hospital offers performances by musicians and clowns as a form of therapy to help children cope with dealing with the stress and fear caused by hospitalization. (Photo by Yves Herman/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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) looks through a window of a research bathyscaphe while submerging into the waters of the Black Sea as he takes part in an expedition near Sevastopol, Crimea, August 18, 2015. (Photo by Alexei Nikolsky/Reuters/RIA Novosti/Kremlin)

Actor Cornelius Obonya as Jedermann and actress Brigitte Hobmeier as Buhlschaft perform on stage during a dress rehearsal of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's drama “Jedermann” (Everyman) at Domplatz square in Salzburg, Austria, July 16, 2015. The play is directed by Julian Crouch and Brian Mertes and will premiere as part of the annual Salzburg cultural Festival on July 19, 2015. (Photo by Leonhard Foeger/Reuters)

A bogieboarder rides a wave at the wedge in Newport Beach, Calif., Wednesday, August 27, 2014. Southern California beachgoers experienced much higher than normal surf, brought on by Hurricane Marie spinning off the coast of Mexico. (Photo by Chris Carlson/AP Photo)