It’s winter, a Sunday, and the afternoon is drawing on. A sunny day, with that biting cold so characteristic of Thessaloniki, and the sun has begun its descent towards the horizon. On days like these, the heart of the city shifts, and so do its symbols. Its centre becomes the area south of Lambraki Street, below Agia Varvara, with Kleanthous Street, in front of the 27th School, looking almost like a pedestrian precinct. On one side, the voices and chants of those gathering, whether in small groups of friends or in great crowds; on the other, the smell coming from the food stalls. Countless food stalls, their speakers blasting songs loud enough to bring tears to your eyes: “…PAOK became Cup winners in a single night, and returned from Athens in glory, carrying the trophy…”. Yet the overwhelming sensation is that of a heart pounding, not with emotion, but with anxiety. There is no PAOK match without anxiety.
You pass through the gate, enter the stadium and find yourself a place on the concrete terraces. Even the smell of the grass brings anxiety. The sun is slowly setting and the floodlights are coming on, the teams are out warming up, and everything conspires to make that anxiety grow. You feel your stomach tightening before the uncertainty of the encounter, wondering what might happen, what might go wrong. You feel sick. The only way to escape this suffocating feeling is to start shouting. By now, the terraces are filling up, more and more people arriving, pouring in right up to the very last moment. The chants and songs are the only things that can keep you going through this torment, and fortunately, thousands of others are doing exactly what brings you relief: “…Mighty PAOK, your strength is us, your thousands of supporters…”.
If you don’t know what this tightening sensation sounds like, you only have to wait for the ritual just before kick-off. The drum takes its place on the centre spot, arms rise into the air, and with a rhythm that grows faster with every beat, you hear the deafening roar: “PAOK … pause … pause … PAOK … pause … PAOK!” You can hear that tightening sensation in the silence between the cries. Everyone shares the same anxiety, as though they themselves were about to step onto the pitch. An illness for which there is neither medicine nor cure.
Then the teams emerge onto the pitch, and thousands of souls who would give anything to be down there, fighting against the opposition, sing an anthem that unites their desperate need to feel just a few metres closer to the protagonists, to those who must carry the hopes of these thousands upon their shoulders. The match begins, kick-off, a few seconds of silence, and then the whistles and jeers begin: the opposition has the ball. This is the moment when you feel you are about to burst. Those opening minutes, while you wait to see “how the team is playing”, are nothing short of hell, a freezing hell. If things go well, everything begins to warm up; if not, the sickness takes hold. In any case, the only deliverance comes with the moment you hear “Gooooooal!” Every other scenario is catastrophic. That goal is the only possible outcome. That’s why you went to the stadium, that’s why you love this cold, the knot in your stomach, the roars that, within the oval shape of Toumba Stadium, produce an extraordinary acoustic effect.
Every encounter with the very idea of PAOK is characterised by participation in a battle. You may not actually be fighting yourself, but that is how you feel, as though it were your own affair, your own responsibility for whatever happens. You become ill when things go wrong. Even when things are going well, you will find something that isn’t and become ill over that too. But this sickness is unlike any other. Instead of consuming you, this gnawing obsession offers you an escape, making your days exciting. It gives you that powerful feeling of serving an idea, and ideas do not make you sick: they make you stronger, they give you experiences, often unforgettable and deeply moving ones. After all, anyone who has never felt that knot in the stomach, that gnawing obsession, that sickness, will never truly experience the joy of victory either, at least not in the way a PAOK supporter knows how to experience it.
Because from the very beginning, PAOK has been this battle and this sickness. It emerged in a city to reflect, in the most profound way, the struggle for survival of a part of its population. Thessaloniki, the Greek city with the longest uninterrupted history, the richest diversity of cultural traditions, and its own distinctive and pioneering past as a port connecting the Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Balkan hinterland and parts of Eastern Europe for centuries, was the ideal home to absorb the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people who had lost every notion of home: their houses, their homeland and, in many cases, even their families.
Thessaloniki had to become their home, and while this was a perfectly natural prospect in the history of the city, given that the centuries-old co-capital had always found ways to assimilate every uprooted person into its culture, there were those “Greeks”, those who believed that this designation belonged exclusively to their own households, who believed that this was their land, who had “decided” that the new element arriving to enrich this magical city with its own distinctive characteristics should not even have the right to life itself.
The answer to this inhuman idea, to this mentality so alien to the history of the city, was PAOK itself: Panthessalonikios Athlitikos Omilos Konstantinoupoliton (Pan-Thessalonian Athletic Club of Constantinopolitans), four words forming a name that perhaps captures better than anything else the very essence of this city, a city of suffering, yet at the same time a proud and majestic lady.
PAOK’s first home, its first stadium, was itself a battle. The refugees themselves guarded its construction so that it could be completed. The club’s very survival was another battle. By the mid-1920s, the city’s establishment already had its representatives, most notably Aris, a club that represented, and for as long as it exists, even if only as a name on paper, will continue to exist to represent, the mentality that sought to keep this part of the city’s population unwelcome. Even today, a hundred years later, the supporters of that club describe PAOK as a “guest in the city”, proudly perpetuating the inhumanity that characterised their ancestors.
PAOK built its home to become “the glory and the joy” of all those who were searching for a place to build their new homes and their new lives. In a city whose population grew from 200,000 to 800,000 as a consequence of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, this new and dynamic section of the population, socially concentrated mainly among the poor and spread across the entire urban area, gathered around four white lines to see their hopes embodied in a black-and-white shirt. They came on foot, walking for kilometres, with nothing to eat throughout the day but a piece of bread that gradually grew stale, giving birth to the historic phrase “PAOK and dry bread”. Back then, the knot in their stomachs was not about victory on the pitch. It was about life itself… and that battle was won triumphantly!
From the day PAOK was founded, it was destined to fight against an establishment. An establishment that did not emerge specifically to fight PAOK, but to fight those who found the essence of their lives within it. At first, it was the establishment of a wealthy caste in Thessaloniki, which took PAOK approximately fifty years to knock to the canvas. And then, particularly from the 1960s onwards, it was the establishment of the capital, Athens, and of the true capital of the Greek state, the stronghold of its owners, the shipowners: Piraeus.
PAOK does not attract the largest number of supporters in Greece, particularly in an era when sport, at the professional level, has drifted so far away from what the struggle of a club, with its own social characteristics, against another once represented. Yet the miracle of PAOK is that, even today, it manages to capture, to an extraordinary degree and in the most beautiful way, the hearts of those who belong to its world.
There are many sporting clubs in Greece with remarkable achievements, but those who follow them, however intensely emotional their love “for the team” may be, cannot easily carry this particular sickness of PAOK. A sickness that does not stem merely from its history, but which every day gives birth to new reasons for legends to emerge around the relationship between its supporters and their club. What makes PAOK different is that even if, for some reason, the team itself were to disappear, PAOK could continue to exist, and the Double-Headed Eagle could nurture beneath its folded wings the new life-giving force. Nothing comparable exists in any other sporting institution in Greece, at least not on such a scale that it touches a substantial proportion of the population of an entire geographical region, as well as a large part of the Greek diaspora.
What PAOK possesses, and no other club does, is supporters who may never even have watched the team play, yet feel immense pride in carrying its emblem somewhere with them, particularly thousands of kilometres away from Toumba. They are the PAOK supporters who, wherever they find themselves in the world, from Easter Island to Mount Everest, even in space, will take their black-and-white flag with them. They are those madmen who find tribes in Africa and teach them the chants that echo through Toumba on those cold winter afternoons.
Those who do not love PAOK and can only observe everything surrounding it from the outside inevitably perceive nothing more than fanatical obsession, the transformation of people who believe in it almost metaphysically, as though it were a religion. But PAOK is not a religion, because nobody’s relationship with it is metaphysical. It is a sickness, because it genuinely produces psychosomatic effects in those who care about it. Above all, however, it is an idea, one that was not born in anyone’s imagination, nor invented by someone seeking to deceive the masses. It is an idea born out of life itself, out of the lives of those who needed to see the pain of their everyday existence, as though in another form of art, painted upon a shirt and transformed into a dance within the four lines of a football pitch.
“You are the glory of our North, our pride and our joy…”
PAOK, YOUR GREATNESS KNOWS NO END!
