Greek markings

[Fadedkrill]

Hello, just yesterday I got this 1928 Savage marked rear grip from Numrich to fit on my project, it’s used and probably has seen better days but it was a reasonable price. What did surprise me is that there were some letters scratched in the wood, and they were Greek. I did contact a buddy from Greece but he didn’t have much of a clue of what it could mean, though he did say the word resembled a mistranslated version of “given” in Greek. If anybody has any idea or leads that would be greatly appreciated 

[Fadedkrill]

After some time researching I got somewhere and I believe it’s as good as it’s going to get. I contacted the Athens War Museum as well as the Royal Armouries in the UK, I honestly thought they would not respond, yet they did and helped me out. From what it can be seen the 78B will usually mean the time of conscription, so the user was conscripted in the latter half of 1978. Now for the Greek words scratched, the consensus was that they spelled out ΔΗΜΟΣ (anglicized Demos or Dimos) which is a common name in Greece. So to summarize, the scratching was made by a man called Demos or Dimos who was conscripted in the latter half of 1978 as a probable NCO and issued the Thompson. Don’t know if they’ll see this but I would like to thank Theofanis Vlachos of the Athens War Museum and Jonathan Ferguson of the Royal Armouries for the help in research.

[StrangeRanger]

Mr. Ferguson is a very helpful person.  He provided some useful information and a .pdf of a Lanchester manual that was simply not available in the US. 

[Fadedkrill]

4 hours ago, StrangeRanger said:

Mr. Ferguson is a very helpful person.  He provided some useful information and a .pdf of a Lanchester manual that was simply not available in the US. 

Yes he’s a great man, very knowledgeable 

[Rekraps]

Great post!

[Rekraps]

Up till now, this was all Greek to me.