Michalis Papazoglou

Michalis Papazoglou was a Greek athlete from Constantinople. He started with track and field sports but when he came to Athens in the early 1910s, he joined the football club PPO (later to become PAO). He was the man who had the idea of adopting the shamrock as the official emblem of Panathinaikos.

Papazoglou was also a great figure in the National Resistance. He joined the resistance group of George Ivanof (or Jerzy Iwanow) - an athlete of Polish origin of Iraklis Thessaloniki. The group's mission was to give information to the English and to organize sabotage. With some external help from the naval base the group succeeded in destroying three German airplanes and sinking three small warships. He was arrested on the 12th of October 1942 and was transferred to the Averof prison, where he pretended he was psychopathic. The Germans then sent him to the Aiginition hospital for further testing. While he was there, the founder of Panathinaikos, Giorgos Kalafatis, and the founder of the PAO basketball team, Petros Giannatos, organized a successful plan to kidnap and free him.