Alex Henderson

The Culture Wars

The Brothels and the Bailout: How Legal Prostitution Helped a Greek Soccer Team in Its Time of Need 

By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, December 28, 2012

As much as sex work is vilified by puritans and theocrats, the fact is that sex workers sometimes use their profits to make generous charitable contributions. And a perfect example can be found in Greece, where a brothel owner recently came through for a struggling soccer team.

It’s no secret that Greece has been devastated by the global economic crisis of 2008-2012 and that harsh austerity measures are pushing that country to the brink. European bankers are bailed out and rewarded for their reckless decisions while Greece suffers with an unemployment rate of 24.4% (as of June 2012). In that painful economic climate, it isn’t surprising that Voukefalas Larissa (an amateur soccer team) was having a difficult time paying for equipment and uniforms. But now, the team is receiving financial help from 67-year-old Soula Alevridou, a.k.a. Madam Soula, who operates two high-end brothels in Larissa, Greece (Villa Erotica and Soula’s House of History). The generous €1000 donation from Alevridou, a former prostitute, was desperately needed.

In Greece, prostitution is legal, carefully regulated and taxed—which is as it should be. And at times, prostitution has been portrayed favorably in Greek pop culture. One of the most famous examples is the 1960 film Never on Sunday, which starred Greek actress/singer Melina Mercouri as an Athens-based prostitute named Ilya and Jules Dassin (a Connecticut-born director/actor who was blacklisted during Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s vicious witchhunt) as the American tourist who tried to save her from herself despite the fact that she was happy with her line of work. Some might argue that although Never on Sunday was filmed in Greece and had a predominantly Greek cast, it wasn’t truly a Greek movie because it was directed by an American and had a lot of dialogue in English; regardless, Never on Sunday was a major hit in Greece and went down in history as a film that portrayed a prostitute in a very favorable light (Mercouri went on to become a major figure in Greek politics and was elected to the Greek parliament in 1977). But while Greece tends to have more grown-up sexual attitudes than the United States and sees the wisdom of keeping prostitution legal, safe and regulated, that doesn’t mean that everyone in Greece is saluting Alevridou for her charity.

Konstantinos Tzanakoulis, the mayor of Larissa, doesn’t like to talk about Alevridou’s donations to Voukefalas.  And when Alevridou wanted to make a generous donation to an elementary school in Patras (a port city on Greece’s west coast), the school refused to accept her donation and returned the check to her. But on the other hand, Ioannis Batziolas (Voukefalas’ president and a backup goalie for the team) has rightly praised Alevridou’s generosity. So has Nikos Daglis, the president of a rival soccer team in Larissa.

The financial mess in Greece is absolutely heartbreaking, especially in light of all that Greece has given to the world: great art and literature, great music, great food, great movies.

Soula Alevridou should be applauded not only for being a smart entrepreneur, but also, for helping her fellow Greeks in their time of need—and the fact that her donations come from sex-related profits is nothing to be ashamed of.

Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson. 

In Greece (a country that is suffering through very bad economic times), brothel owner Soula Alevridou has generously donated  €1000 to a struggling amateur soccer team. The two photos above were taken by Alex Henderson during a visit to Athens in 2008.