A woman cuts her hair during a protest against the death of Iranian Mahsa Amini and the government of Iran on October 02, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Commuters make their way across a street during rainfall in New Delhi on June 27, 2024. (Photo by Arun Sankar/AFP Photo)

Wounded women arrive at a hospital for treatment after two blasts, which killed at least five and wounded a dozen, outside the airport in Kabul on August 26, 2021. (Photo by Wakil Kohsar/AFP Photo)

A farmer carries a bundle of wheat after harvesting it from a field in the Gharbia Governorate, as Egypt ramps up efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Egypt on May 14, 2020. (Photo by Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)

A woman jumps over a fire during the celebration of the summer solstice at a festival in the village of Okunevo in Omsk region, Russia on June 22, 2025. (Photo by Alexey Malgavko/Reuters)

Employees prepare spacesuits at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on August 19, 2015. Members of the main crew of the 45/46 expedition to the International Space Station ISS, Kazakhstan's cosmonaut Aydyn Aimbetov, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Denmark's astronaut Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency, are scheduled to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) on September 2, 2015. (Photo by AFP Photo)

A masked reveller poses near Saint Mark's Square during the Venetian Carnival in Venice January 31, 2015. (Photo by Stefano Rellandini/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.