Prague/Ostrava, North Moravia, Aug 15 (CTK) – Statis Prusalis, a Czech Communist singer of Greek origin and a friend of President Milos Zeman for whom he composed a number of songs, died at the age of 67 on Saturday, the Communist have said on their Twitter.
Prusalis had a chateau in Ostrava-Poruba repaired.
Born in 1948, Prusalis was moved to the former Czechoslovakia in the same year. His father died in an anti-monarchist uprising in the Greek mountains.
Prusalis spent a part of his childhood in children’s homes. In the 1970s, he worked as a driver of Communist senior apparatchiks.
Then he studied at a conservatoire and formed the Greek-Czech folk rock group Ateny (Athens).
After the overthrow of the Communist regime in 1989, Prusalis often performed at Communist public rallies, in Moscow and North Korea.
In 1999, he released a record in which he praised Communist leaders Lenin and Stalin.
Prusalis was a collaborator of secret services of the former Communist Czechoslovakia.
“I believed in socialism. For its defence, I was ready to do everything with which its intelligence services entrusted me and what I was tasked to do in the world,” Prusalis said.
In the chateau, he opened a cultural centre to which he invited Czech and foreign leftist artists. He was also repeatedly visited there by Zeman.
“We are tied by a long-term friendship with Milos,” Prusalis said in 2010.
“He is coming here, he lives here, he smokes his cigarettes here,” he added.
pv/dr/hol
