People help a woman overwhelmed by emotion and the heat during the mass funeral, attended by tens of thousands of mourners, of 613 coffins of newly-identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre at the Potocari cemetery and memorial near Srebrenica on July 11, 2011 in Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Salespeople roll out a reproduction of the famous work “Girl with a Pearl Earring” at the artist village on June 11, 2014 in Shenzhen, China. The Dafen Artist Village in Guangdong province, China, is home to thousands of artists who reproduce some of the world's most iconic paintings as well as create their own works. The village, on the outskirts of Shenzhen, is becoming a major center for original Chinese art. (Photo by Palani Mohan/Getty images)

Tens of thousands of vehicles damaged by super storm Sandy are being temporarily stored on runways and taxiways at Calverton Executive Airpark in Calverton, New York, on January 9, 2013 in this aerial view. Insurance Auto Auctions Inc, a salvage auto auction company specializing in total-loss vehicles, acquired the cars and trucks that were damaged, destroyed or flooded by the storm and needed a place to store them. The company made a deal with the Town of Riverhead to lease the airport land and then the vehicles are auctioned online. (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP Photo)

“Coming back home at 5am sunrise, I was just beginning to digest the grand event I was lucky to witness and cover: the wedding of the grandson of one of the most influential spiritual leaders in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community...”. – Ronen Zvulun via Reuters. Photo: Ultra-orthodox Jewish wedding in Israel. Tens of thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Belz Hasidic dynasty gather at the wedding ceremony of Rabbi Shalom Rokach in Kiryat Belz, in Jerusalem, on May 21, 2013. Around 25,000 ultra-orthodox Jews took part, making it one of the biggest weddings of the past few years. (Photo by Gil Cohen)

A view of the Tianducheng development in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province August 1, 2013. Tianducheng, developed by Zhejiang Guangsha Co. Ltd., started constructing in 2007 and was known as a knockoff of Paris with a scaled-replica of the Eiffel Tower, standing 108 metres, and Parisian houses. Although designed to accommodate at least ten thousand people, Tianducheng remains sparsely populated and is now considered as a “ghost town”, according to local media. (Photo by Aly Song/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.

A well-dressed bulldog has amassed thousands of fans online, after her owner took to dressing her up in wildly elaborate outfits and posting the pictures to the photo-sharing site Instagram. Tania Ahsan, 31, of New York, has posted online over 500 pictures of her patient pooch, Maya, and nearly 70,000 people have followed her exploits. Maya has been pictured as Queen Victoria, King Kong, Elvis Presley and Sherlock Bones, and far from wriggling out of the getups as soon as possible, Ahsan says Maya loves it. Here: Maya as a monkey and a banana. (Photo by Tania Ahsan/Caters News)

In this September 19, 2014 photo, explosives are detonate by Peruvian counternarcotics forces on a part of a clandestine grassy airstrip in the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro River Valleys, or VRAEM, the world's No. 1 coca-growing region, in Ayacucho, Peru. The dynamiting of craters by Peruvian security forces into clandestine airstrips cuts into profits but hardly discourages cocaine traffickers who net tens of thousands of dollars with each flight flown from these airstrips. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)