In 2015, handbags started appearing on the statues of Sweden.

In the city of Vexil, a statue of a Lutheran priest suddenly dawned a classic beige bag.

In Helsingborg, a copper man held a sword in one arm and a colorful bag with an embroidered

hummingbird in the other.

In Stockholm, a blocky statue of a Swedish politician carried a ditty yellow purse.

These mysterious handbags were all a part of a protest, a protest against a local government's decision

to not build a certain statue.

This hypothetical statue, in question, would be based on an iconic photograph.

This photograph had become recognizable in Sweden and elsewhere, and it had become

a kind of activist symbol.

And it seems like everyone wanted this statue to be built, except for one person, the

son of the woman in the photograph.

I'm Dylan Thoris and this is Atlas Obscura, celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today, we travel to Vexil, Sweden, and hear the story of the woman with a handbag.

After this.

So this is a black and white photograph.

I'm now doing it for my own memory, but it's scorched into my own memory in many ways.

Samuel Merrill is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Center

for Digital Social Research at Umeå University in northern Sweden.

And he has studied this particular photograph a lot.

The photo itself captures a protest at a very specific moment in time.

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