Iraklis Thessaloniki

The Ivanofeio Sports Arena seats 2,580 people, a modest hall for a club whose name still carries the weight of Heracles. Ημίθεος, the Demigod, is one of two nicknames Iraklis has answered to for most of its existence; the other, Γηραιός, the Elder, refers to nothing but age.

That age goes back to 1921, when the basketball department was formed inside a multisport club already founded in 1908. Iraklis won the first Greek Championship, in 1927–28, and took it again in 1934–35. Three runner-up finishes followed later, in 1935–36, 1961–62 and 1963–64.

What the club could not survive was the decade after 2010. Relegations and unpaid debts turned those years into what is remembered locally as the Stone Years, and by 2022 the original basketball section, by then over a hundred years old, was dissolved for insolvency. A new club took up the blue and white within the same year, drawn from the Greek flag, and started again in the second division. It returned to the top-flight Greek Basketball League for the 2025–26 season and now also plays in the European North Basketball League.

The rivalry with PAOK and Aris still frames the basketball calendar in the city, the three clubs' meetings together known as the Derby of Thessaloniki. When Iraklis had to start over, the new entity was named N.G.S. Iraklis Thessaloniki 1908, fixing in its own title the year the parent club had begun.