I see.. Yes the engraving seems high end and looks better in hand. The hammer can be pulled back and released with the trigger albeit difficultly. In any case i dont think there are many specialistn in Greece to restore it so it will likely stay as it is. Was the usage of older rifles parts a common practise? When could a sporting rifle like this be made? Thanks again for the usefull input!
I know very little about the history of Greece after the mid-fifteenth century, so take everything I saw with a grain of salt.
My wild guess would be somewhere between 1860 and 1950.
The use of old parts to create a composite weapon was pretty common wherever compatible parts and poverty coincided. Lots of poverty in 19th and 20th century Greece...Lots of violence as well. The inletting and lack of a proper ramrod hole, combined with decent stock shaping suggest to me that whoever stocked it was a competent woodcarver but had little or no previous experience stocking guns and lacked specialized tools. It has also been repaired to fix a split behind the hammer, so it likely saw some service before the barrel was lost.
If that is an Enfield lock, than it is more likely to be an 1842 or an 1851 lock, not the 1853 model - the hammer is slenderer and has a more pronounced spur on the trigger than the 1853, I think. I doubt that such a thing would be floating around the Balkans prior to the Crimean War, when they were replaced by the brand-new 1853 pattern. If is a civilian lock then the lock might conceivably date to the 1840s, based on the existence of military locks of that shape - I know little about British sporting guns of the percussion period, though, and others here may have better answers than I. The actual gun would have been long enough afterwards for the parts to become "spare," of course. As for the latest it could have been made, I wouldn't rule out the 1940s, which saw both Axis occupation and the Greek Civil War following, which ended in 1949. Based on that repair and probable significant length of service I'd hypothesize that it wasn't
primarily made as a last-ditch partisan weapon in the 1940s to be discarded when a better weapon came along, but that is just a guess.
If you want to nail it down further, trying to figure where that buttplate was made and where might be a place to start. I wouldn't assume that it is English, BTW.
Edited to add: It just occurred to me that the front sidescrew hole has been filled in. The lockplate has been worn or filed away there also, prior to inletting...It seems unlikely that the guy that made that triggerguard would bother fill in the screwhole, so I wonder if that lock on its third stock...
