Turkish Mauser Model 1890

About the Turkish Mauser Model 1890

The Turkish Mauser Model 1890 is a bolt-action service rifle developed by Waffenfabrik Mauser of Oberndorf for the Ottoman Empire as an improved evolution of the Belgian Model 1889. Chambered in the 7.65x53mm Mauser cartridge, it replaced the M1889's protruding, barrel-jacketed design with a cleaner arrangement that housed a five-round single-column box magazine flush within the stock and dispensed with the sheet-steel barrel jacket. Loaded from stripper clips and using a cock-on-closing striker action, roughly 280,000 were ordered by the Ottoman government. The rifle saw combat in the First Balkan War and World War I, and many surviving examples were later rechambered to 7.92x57mm Mauser in the 1930s.

Many Model 1890 rifles outlived their original 7.65mm chambering: Turkish arsenals rebarreled numbers of them to 7.92x57mm in the 1930s, and some remained in reserve or paramilitary hands long enough to appear as late as the Cyprus crisis of the 1960s.

Turkish Mauser Model 1890 specifications

The Model 1890 sits between the Belgian M1889 and the more famous Turkish Model 1893 in Mauser's development lineage; its flush internal magazine was a key step toward the classic staggered-column Mauser magazine. Numerous rifles were reworked and rebarreled to 7.92x57mm during Turkish arsenal modernization in the interwar years.