A fire engulfs The Address Hotel in downtown Dubai in the United Arab Emirates December 31, 2015. Fire engulfed a luxury building near the world’s tallest skyscraper in Dubai on Thursday as tens of thousands of people were gathering at its base for one of the world’s largest New Year’s fireworks displays. (Photo by Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters)

Students stand on the roof of a wooden boat as haze blankets the Musi River while they travel to school in Palembang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, September 10, 2015. Indonesia is investigating 10 firms over worsening forest fires that have created a blanket of smog over Southeast Asia, threatening them with sanctions if they are found responsible, a government minister said on Tuesday. The thick haze from Indonesia's Sumatra and Kalimantan islands has forced the repeated cancellation of flights in the area and pushed air quality to unhealthy levels in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

A car drives past burning trees as a wildfire rages in the northern city of Haifa, Israel November 24, 2016. Hundreds of Israelis fled their homes on the outskirts of the country's third city Haifa with others trapped inside as firefighters struggled to control raging bushfires, officials said. (Photo by Gil Eliyahu/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 monk prays during the annual Fire Festival held at the Konjoin Temple on June 28, 2006 in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. Every year around 1000 visitors come to participate and to wish for good luck at the 1200 year old Temple. (Photo by Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images)

Border between Sweden and Norway at Moldusen. An approximately 20-meter wide clearing in the forest separates the two Scandinavian nations, consequently cutting Finnskogen in two. Grue Finnskog 2016. (Photo by Terje Abusdal/The Washington Post)

A photo taken by a member of the County Durham and Darlington fire and rescue Service of a coach on fire on the A1 in County Durham, England on March 2, 2017. Passengers were evacuated safely before flames engulfed the vehicle. (Photo by County Durham and Darlington Fir/PA Wire)