Iraklis 1908

Kaftanzoglio Stadium has space for 27,560.

The club that moved in came out of a merger. Two Thessaloniki gymnastic societies, Omilos Filomouson and Olympia, joined in November 1908 to form Makedonikos Gymnastikos Syllogos — a general athletics body, football only one part of what it did. The name Iraklis arrived a couple of years later, and by 1915 the full title fixed the club to the city: Gymnastikos Syllogos Thessalonikis Iraklis.

For most of the first half-century the football was regional. Iraklis won the Macedonian championship in 1926 and again in 1938 and 1939, and took the Northern Greek title along the way, at a time when the national game had not yet settled into a single league.

The trophy that still gets named first is the Greek Cup of 1976. Four years later came promotion as champions of Beta Ethniki, and in 1985 the Balkans Cup — the club's only continental prize, won against opposition from across the region.

Then it stopped. Iraklis went bankrupt in 2017, and the blue-and-white shirt disappeared from the fixture lists until 2021, when the club was reconstituted as P.O.T. Iraklis and began again from the bottom.

Kaftanzoglio has outlasted all of it. The track is still there, the stands are still too big for the crowds that come, and on a full night the noise carries across a corner of Thessaloniki that has watched this club through both versions of itself.