A masked Palestinian uses a board to protect himself during clashes with Israeli forces which occurred shortly before Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' speech to the the United Nations General Assembly, on September 23, 2011 in Qalandia, West Bank. (Photo by Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

A customer asks for the price of a bittergourd at Duri market on a railway track in Jakarta, January 8, 2016. Indonesia's annual inflation rate cooled to the lowest in six years in December, which might pave the way for the central bank to cut a benchmark rate held at 7.50 percent since February 2015. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

A Palestinian demonstrator (R) shouts at an Israeli soldier, during clashes with Israeli troops at the Qalandiya checkpoint, on June 5, 2011 between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. The clashes come on the 44th Anniversary of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War of the Middle East. (Photo by David Vaaknin /Getty Images)

A woman places her fingers into the crucifix-shaped holes in one of the ancient columns in the Church of the Nativity on December 22, 2011 in Bethlehem, West Bank. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

Meenakshi Amman Temple and Meenakshi Amman Kovil is a historic Hindu temple located on the southern bank of the Vaigai River in the temple city of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. It is dedicated to Parvati, known as Meenakshi, and her consort, Shiva, here named Sundareswarar.

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 vendor (C) serves customers at a vegetable market as a commuter train passes in Jakarta October 2, 2015. Indonesia's high annual inflation rate cooled in September and should drop more by year-end, but it likely will be 2016 before the central bank can cut interest rates to help an economy growing at its slowest pace in six years. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

Nubian women sell traditional handicrafts at the Nubian Gharb Suheil village, near Aswan south of Egypt, October 1, 2015. For half a century, Egypt's Nubians have patiently lobbied the government in Cairo for a return to their homelands on the banks of the upper Nile, desperate to reclaim territory their ancestors first cultivated 3,000 years ago. (Photo by Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)