That would be my guess as well: Gewehr 88: but only a guess on my part.

 

From the length and front sight it is the carbine version-KAR88.

 

Well, if it is a Gewehr 88, the cartridges in his belt (not the bandoliers) are not going to fit. They look a bit more like 11mm.

 

Kar 71?

 

It could be a Mauser, a Mannlicher or even a Martini. Just not enough visual reference to make a determination.

 

Maybe a Serbian Koka carbine.

 

Looks like 11mm ammo on belt most probably for french Gras or other 11mm Rifle. The greek equipment would be probably the most typical for that region.

 

Ottomans had 71/84 carbines if I'm not mistaken, and they look about right. It'd be more accessible to the Macedonians in that case as well, so I'm lead to think it's this over a Kar88. Another area of uncertainty, but for these photos I feel like the subjects were dressed up a bit more, so perhaps the bandoliers have nothing to do with the rifle, but more so just to emulate his prowess. My $0.02

 

These types of photos were almost always staged. A soldier would wear a clean jacket supplied by the photographer and would wear props that were also supplied by the photographer. This photo would have been taken most likely using "tintype" and then colorized using AI, so we won't know what the AI editor did to the end of the rifle. If you look at where the barrel should be at the end of the rifle, the AI editor made it smooth so it could have removed some of the barrel that might have been sticking out.

You can also see that the rifle ammo on the left is a different color than the ammo on the right. As well, the embroidery on the soldiers jacket is the same red as the jacket it's self where is was most likely a different color (grey, gold, blue, etc...)

It's a cool photo never the less, but for all we know the rifle could be a stick dressed up to look cool for the photo shoot.

JM2C

 

Don't know if it helps at all, but I found the original image on Wikimedia.

 

While he seems to have 11mm cartridges on his cross belts, he does have bottleneck longer cartridges in his waist belt.

 

It could be an 1887 Turk Mauser carbine. The 1887 was first Mauser Turkey adopted. There were no 71/84 Mauser carbines originally made in 11mm I'm aware of (there were 11mm 1871 single shot Mauser carbines, the Kar 1871 as noted.) The Ottoman caliber was 9.5 mm which was felt by Paul Mauser to be the optimum size for black powder. (Interestingly, the Martini-Henry Mk IV was of a similar .40 or so caliber but Britain never adopted it due to adopting the .303, and all the Mk IVs were converted to .450 caliber of the earlier Mks I, II and III, plus newly produced guns to make a total of about 100,000).
The Turk 9.5mm 1887 Mausers were ordered in a quantity of 500,000 but the Ottomans only accepted delivery of about 220,000 rifles and perhaps 5,000 carbines before using a clause in the contract to replace the tubular magazine black powder rifles to the 1890 Turk Mauser (stripper clip box magazine) in 7.65 mm smokeless.
So....if the man in the photo is holding an 1887 Ottoman carbine (and it could be) it's a fairly rare gun by military standards.

 

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but during the transition from black to smokeless powder, a concern was that reducing the bore of the rifle too much would lead to excessive fouling. Hence the British .402 cartridge originally attended to the Mk IV Martini and the 9.5mm cartridge of Mauser (which has English bore of .38 to nearest 100th) and were "small bore" for black powder. And yet, at least the original 8mm Mannlicher Austrian cartridge, the original 8mm Portugese Kropatschek cartridge, the original 7.5mm Swiss cartridge and the original .303 British cartridge were originally loaded with compressed black powder. The transition was occurring in a relatively peaceful period of history, but has anyone ever seen any accounts of excessive fouling with the early compressed black powder small bore loads? Some of these loads were driven to fairly high velocities for black powder, although perhaps the jacketed bullets which I believe they all used (thanks to Swiss Colonel Rubin) MAY have helped somewhat. And the bullet weights were originally greater than what later became standard for most of them, which raised muzzle energy while reducing velocity somewhat, which along with the jacketed bullet probably helped reduce "stripping" straight through the rifling without acquiring the spin which had supposedly been observed on big bore black powder express hunting rifles. The compressed black powder small bore loads were not used for much more than a couple years, if that, but I did wonder about the potential for fouling.
By the way, also: my understanding is that the 1887 Mausers saw little combat use since Abdulhamid, the Ottoman Sultan when they were adopted, didn't totally trust his Army. So actual use may not have occurred until World War I for issue to 2nd line forces. Must confess I'm not totally clear on this either. Mauser supposedly had some overruns of the contract for the 1887s which were issued to 2nd line Wurtemburg formations in WWI, so perhaps some were available on the open market. My understanding is that the Wurtemburg rifles are marked in German, not Osmanli but I've only seen photos. (I probably spelled some of this wrong, so please forgive me for that.)

 

I feel like this is a Serbian model 1884 Mauser "Koke" carbine. I say that because I'm going off the front barrel band.
Image below is from Robert ball's Mauser Military Rifles of the World fifth edition. Page 313.

 

I feel like this is a Serbian model 1884 Mauser "Koke" carbine. I say that because I'm going off the front barrel band.
Image below is from Robert ball's Mauser Military Rifles of the World fifth edition. Page 313.

good eyes !
That's a very good match for the Front barrel band. A Turk M1889 carbine won't match that well.
Chris