Kleanthis Vikelidis

Charilaou gives the ground away before Aris ever take the field: the name on the sign is Kleanthis Vikelidis, but the district around it does the talking, and to most of the club's own supporters this stadium has only ever been "Charilaou". It opened on 4 November 1951, and the club marked the occasion with a match against Thermaikos that Aris won 3-2 in front of more than 14,000 people.

The bowl did not arrive whole. A roof went up over the west stand in 1972, the south stand followed in 1975, and the east and north sides were built through the early 1980s. The record crowd belongs to that older version of the ground: 27,500 for a match against AEK on 11 March 1979, a number the current capacity could not accommodate. Financial trouble slowed the next big change. Ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics, when the stadium was pressed into service as a training venue, the old west stand came down for a two-tier replacement in the club's yellow and black, with plexiglass in place of old fencing, executive boxes, a restaurant and a press centre added alongside it. The contractor's own finances meant the roof work dragged into the summer of 2005, well past the deadline the Olympics had set. The safety standards that came with that rebuild trimmed capacity from around 23,200 down to 22,800, where it remains.

The pitch is newer still: a hybrid surface went in during 2019, replacing the natural grass that had covered it since 1951. Kleanthis Vikelidis sits on Alkminis 69 in the Charilaou district of Thessaloniki, still known by the name of the neighbourhood as much as the man on the sign.