The messages on Liverpool fans’ websites these past couple of days have tended to dwell on the essential issue here: how do I get a ticket? Some are also asking: “Where do we meet?” Or: “Where can I sleep?” And littered in among all that has been something completely different: a call for fans to congregate at the port of Piraeus outside Olympiacos FC’s Karaiskaki Stadium at 1pm today for an unofficial service of remembrance.

This is a soul-stirring, very football kind of thing. A number of Liverpool fans had made it to the Karaiskaki yesterday and, as a sign of the tragic kinship that the two clubs share, draped their scarves, flags and flowers across the two Olympiacos memorials. One scarf bore the significant logo of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. Another message, penned across a Liverpool shirt, read simply: “21 and 96. Never forget.”

The figure 96 represents the Liverpool fans who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The 21 represents those Olympiacos fans who had perished in similarly horrific circumstances in their home ground eight years earlier.

There is a feeling around Olympiacos of a deep connection between themselves and Liverpool. Both wear red, both are clubs in port cities, both have held sway for long periods in their domestic game – Olympiacos have won 35 titles in the 71 years of the Greek league championship. But above all it is their tragedies that have twinned them. After Hillsborough, representatives of Olympiacos attended memorial services – they had a good understanding of what Liverpool was going through.

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Background

• Debate: how can Liverpool beat Milan?

• Gerrard calls for heroes to make history

• Two clubs united by darkest days in history

• Istanbul has not scarred us

• The writing’s on the banner

Multimedia

• Athens audiocasts

• Rafael Benitez podcast

• Songs of The Kop

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• Liverpool must take command of midfield

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• Road to Athens

• Gerrard v Gattuso

• Controlling Kaka

The Gate Seven tragedy, as it is called here, occurred on February 8, 1981 on the back of a huge Olympiacos victory. The Karaiskaki at that time was the old revamped version of the stadium built to be the velodrome for the 1896 Olympic Games. Gate Seven was where the loudest, most enthusiastic fans would congregate and on the days of a good win, tradition had it that, minutes before the end of the game, they would flood out of Gate Seven to get to Gate One to cheer their conquering heroes, where they would come off the pitch.

That day did indeed deliver a good win. It was a first-versus-second clash; Olympiacos, top, against AEK Athens. Olympiacos won 6-0 and two minutes before the final whistle, their fans made for the exit. To get to Gate Seven they had to go down a flight of steps. On this occasion, however, the gates had not been fully opened, they were only sufficiently ajar for a single person to squeeze through and could not be pushed wider. The problem started when one fan slipped over at the bottom of the steps and thereafter the crush down the stairs from above forced a pile of human bodies to build.

Just as Liverpool are with their Hillsborough 96, so Olympiacos are resolutely determined that their 21 dead should remain a part of the present.

The Olympiacos museum is particularly vivid in this: it contains those two heavy iron gates that refused to open, plus testimony of those who survived the disaster. “It became like a human snowball,” one said. “For 15 minutes my feet didn’t touch the ground,” another said. “There were people below me and people above. It was like a nightmare.”

And now, every year, on February 8, a crowd of 1,000-plus congregates for a memorial service. Almost every one of them by now knows the name of the youngest who died that day, 14-year-old Panaiotis Toumanidis, the captain of a local basketball team who had gone to the match intending to leave to go straight to team practice. Today, one of Toumanidis’s teammates, Stavros Elliniadis, is the general manager of the Olympiacos basketball team.

One of those who helps to organise such memorials is Filipos Kontoudis, who was 15 at the time, one of the lucky few that day who had left earlier and slipped through Gate Seven before the crush. After cheering his team off the pitch, Kontoudis found himself assisting the police and ambulance men in carrying bodies from the foot of the gates.

“That day still preys on my mind,” he said. “Carrying people the way I did, those images don’t leave you.”

Kontoudis has been to Anfield and paid his respects at the Hillsborough Memorial and he is overjoyed that similar sentiments are being paid in return today at the place where Gate Seven used to stand. The old Karaiskaki Stadium was knocked down and rebuilt in 2003; on the day the old Gate Seven was bulldozed, about 5,000 people gathered to watch as this piece of history was turned to rubble.

They cannot tell how many will be there today, 200 possibly; it is an event that has spread via word of mouth and the internet, so no one can be sure. But for Kontoudis, the gesture speaks volumes. “What they are doing is a big honour,” he said. “We feel Liverpool fans are like our brothers.”