The Sintians () were a group of people who were known to the Greeks as pirates and raiders."Warlike" to Anacreon (fr. eleg. West 3), who had spent some time in Thrace, often referenced in his poetry (Onofrio Vox, "I Sinti in Anacreonte", Hermes 122.1 (1994:116–118). They are also referred to as a Thracian peopleJ. Wiesner, Die Thraker (Stuttgart, 1963:13ff).Thucydides, History, II.101 who once inhabited the area of SinticeD. C. Samsaris, Historical Geography of Eastern Macedonia during the Antiquity (in Greek), Thessaloniki 1976 (Society for Macedonian Studies), pp. 56–57. . and the island of Lemnos which was also called in ancient times Sinteis.Guy Hedreen, The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece: Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity, Cambridge University Press, 2016, , p. 137. Some scholars have suggested that they were not Thracians but Pelasgians, related to another group who lived in Samothrace, also known as Sintians.
The Sintians worshipped Hephaestus. They are mentioned in Homer: in the Iliad1.594 and 18.394. as the folk who had tended Hephaestus in Lemnos after the lame smith god was let fall to earth; the Sintians "of wild speech" (ἀγριόφωνοι agriophonoi) also appear in the Odyssey;8.294 Homer, Odyssey in the tradition reported by Homer it was understood by their incomprehensible speech that they were among the non-Hellenic peoples of the Aegean."Hephaistos is most at home among the Sintians of Lemnos, who do not even speak Greek," observes Guy Hedreen, in "The Return of Hephaistos, Dionysiac Processional Ritual and the Creation of a Visual Narrative", The Journal of Hellenic Studies 124 (2004:38–64) p. 39. "Because the Sintians have no place in the immediate context (that is, they are not asking the god for anything), we may suspect that they were the ones who in some pre-Homeric myth rescued the god."Bruce Karl Braswell, "Mythological Innovation in the Iliad", The Classical Quarterly, New Series, 21.1 (May 1971:16–26) p. 20. In 2002 the city of Heraclea Sintica was accidentally discovered at the foot of an extinct volcano on the land of Rupite, Bulgaria.Heraclea Sintica: from Hellenistic Polis to Roman Civitas: (4th C. BC - 6th C. AD); Proceedings of a Conference at Petrich, Bulgaria, September 19–31, 2013, Volume 2 of Papers of the American Research Center in Sofia, Contributor Ljudmil Ferdinandov Vagalinski.
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