In northwest Russia, in a small village called Alekhovshchina, Nadia Sablin's aunts spend the warmer months together in the family home and live as the family has always lived, chopping wood to heat the house and making their own clothes. Sablin's book of photographs, “Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila”, is published by Duke University Press. Here: “Two-Handed Saw, 2014”. (Photo by Nadia Sablin)

This Strange Russian Cartoon Shows Mario's Nasty Side and bogatyr or vityaz is a stock character in medieval East Slavic legends (byliny), akin to a Western European knight-errant.

An Orthodox activist (Right) clashes with a gay rights campaigner during a protest outside of the State Duma, Russian Parliament's lower chamber, in downtown Moscow, January 22, 2013. (Photo by Ilya Pitalev/RIA Novosti)

“A bare-breasted feminist activist bearing a threatening message on her body tried to attack the Russian Orthodox Church's leader Thursday, July 26, 2012, to protest alleged anti-Ukrainian policies by the church and the Kremlin”. – HeraldNet.com

Photo: A topless protester from the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN is blocked by a security guard and a priest as she tries to throw herself at the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. (Photo by Associated Press)

Police officers detain a woman during an unsanctioned rally in the center of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, July 27, 2019. Russian police are wrestling with demonstrators and have arrested hundreds in central Moscow during a protest demanding that opposition candidates be allowed to run for the Moscow city council. (Photo by Pavel Golovkin/AP Photo)

Russian police detain a protester at a demonstration against President Vladimir Putin in St.Petersburg, Russia, Saturday, May 5, 2018. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

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.