Employees cover bacon on fried dranik, a potato pancake that is the national dish of Belarus, in the Sula History Park near the village of Sula, Belarus March 7, 2016. According to the park's representatives, the two-metre-wide pancake was an attempt to enter the Guinness World Records as the world's largest dranik. (Photo by Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

Jeison Rodriguez (L), 19, the living person with the largest feet in the world, poses for a picture with his older brother Wilmer, 24, outside their house in Maracay, Venezuela, October 14, 2015. Rodriguez, holds the Guinness World Record for the largest feet, with 40.1 cm (1 ft 3.79 in) on the right foot and 39.6 cm (1 ft 3.59 in) on the left foot. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Julia Gunthel aka Zlata is just a lovely person who lives and operates in Germany. She is just 27 year-old and is considered to be the absolute most flexible/ bendiest person in the world. Remarkably she is also included in the Guinness Book of Records for a bit. Julia can very quickly hide in a package of 50x50 cm. She currently broke many earth files simply because of her unbelievable flexibility.

A group of 1000 customers receive a facial massage at a sports centre in Jinan, Shandong province, China, May 4, 2015. A group of 1000 women were given a 30 minutes facial beauty treatment together on Monday that achieved a Guinness record for the largest group of people having beauty treatment in the same location, according to local media. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Participants in the Grelka Fest at the Sheregesh resort in Tashtagolsky District of Kemerovo Oblast, Russia on April 22, 2017. Russian girls marked the end of the ski season with a record-breaking bikini ski festival at Siberia’s top winter resort, Sheregesh. Some 1,498 skiers and snowboarders undressed to impress in the annual event as they took to the pistes under blues skies and sunshine in a bracing temperature of just 5°C. (Photo by Grelka Fest/The Siberian Times)

Tourists walk behind a faded sign warning of tsunami hazard in Khao Lak, Phang Nga province December 15, 2014. Ahead of the anniversary of the 2004 tsunami, experts and officials say key weaknesses remain across the region in the system designed to warn people of the next disaster, and get them to safety. Thailand prepares to mark the tenth anniversary of the 2004 tsunami, the deadliest on the record, that killed at least 226,000 people in 13 Asian and African countries. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/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.

The brutalist war memorials found throughout the former Yugoslavia were weird enough when they were built in the 1960s and 70s. Today, separated by the end of an architectural movement and the disintegration of the country, they seem almost alien. Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers treats them purely as artistic objects in his book, “Spomenik”, named for the Serb-Croat word for monument. Known for photographing geographical oddities, Kempenaers was captivated by the spomenik after seeing them in an art encyclopedia. After hearing that many had been destroyed or abandoned, he set out to record what was left. (Photo by Jan Kempenaers)