Memories of a sensual city - A tour of the former Red Light District of Thessaloniki

In an unconventional tour of Thessaloniki the delegates were able to learn from the very knowledgeable tour guide Tasos Papadopoulos from Thessaloniki Walking Tours the unspoken history of the city, this of the interconnected sex work and LGBTQI+ communities that were both forced to live in hiding for years due to shame and issues of illegality. Tasos walked us through the alleys that made up the red light district in the past all the way to the present starting from the Ladadika district and ending the tour in the Vardaris area. The participants were introduced to ‘Kalliarda’, the secret language the LGBTQI+ community in Greece invented and starting using in the 1940s to protect their gender and sexual identity, but also to the courageous activism of the LGBTQI+ community for their rights, the porn cinemas where gay men would go in the past to meet people in a relatively safe environment, the arrests of trans people due to cross-dressing, the transgender beauty contest, the history of sex work in the city and its key figures and the medical precautions sex workers would take to stay safe when condoms and other forms of contraception were still a big taboo. The overall tour was very lyric with frequent references to the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy and Dinos Christianopoulos and the songs of Dimitris Mitropanos.