This label of a Greek wine bottle is very intersting in several respects:
a) The words "Katogi" and "Averof" can be read either as Greek or as Cyrillic, thereby demonstrating the same effect that the development of the Cyrillic alphabet originally had: Bulgaria could demonstrate to Byzantinum that its used a script that looked very much like the Greek script, with some marginal additions.
b) The text on the label uses a historical form of the Greek script which is identical to the forms used in Slavic manuscripts
c) the enlarged portion of the label shows another interesting fact: the "special gamma" used by Meletij Smotric'kij in his "Grammar" (1619) is nothing but the Greek lowercase gamma. It can be seen here three times: twice in the word "Paragogí" (first line below "Averof", first word) and once in "Katogi" (second line below "Averof", first word). This form of the Greek gamma as used by Smotric'kij is the origin of the Ukrainian "Ghe upturn" character - see below (Rudnyc'kyj 1943)!
Note: Although officially non-existent in Modern Greek (and not available in the Greek Unicode block), the ligature OY (OU) so well known from medieval Greek manuscripts, is sometimes still in use today, as seen in this example in the name of the ubiquituous biscuit company
