Hristo Botev

The nickname came first. In 1923 the Catholic College of St Augustine laid out a football pitch on this ground in the Kamenitsa district, and Plovdiv has called the place Kolezha — the College — ever since. The stadium that replaced the pitch went up from July 1959 to a design by the architect Anton Karagyozov, and opened on 14 May 1961 with a friendly against Steaua of Bucharest that Botev won 3-0. The name has not changed since.

The old ground held 35,000 and once held rather more than that. On 27 February 1963, for a Cup Winners' Cup tie against Atlético Madrid that finished 1-1, 40,000 people got in. Three years later a league match against Levski drew 37,000. In the 1960s crowd trouble at derbies pushed Botev to move some of those fixtures elsewhere.

Demolition of the old stands began in 2013-14, then stopped: the club's owner was arrested and the KTB bank collapsed, and the site remained unfinished. Work restarted in November 2020, with a consortium of PIMK and Valmex contracted in December that year to finish the job for about 43.65m leva before VAT. The rebuilt ground reopened on 29 April 2023, again against Levski — this time a 1-0 defeat, with a concert attached.

What came out of it is a single-tier bowl, three-quarters of it roofed, seated in the club's yellow and black, with 600 parking spaces and a UEFA category 4 rating that admits European ties up to the semi-final stage. A Goran Bregović concert planned for 2024 was moved to protect the pitch.