The
Sintians (; ), "the Raiders, the Plunderers", from
Ancient Greek sinteis, "destructive") were known to the Greeks as
pirates and raiders; they are also referred to as a
Thracian people who once inhabited the area of the nowadays
Sintiki province of
Greece, the island of
Lemnos (hence
Sintêïs) is an old name for Lemnos and the southwestern corner of Bulgaria. The Sintians worshipped
Hephaestus. They are mentioned in
Homer: in the
Iliad 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; in the tradition reported by Homer it was understood by their incomprehensible speech that they were among the non-Hellenic peoples of the
Aegean. "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." In 2002 the city of
Heraclea Sintica was accidentally discovered at the foot of an extinct volcano on the land of
Rupite, Bulgaria. Thus ended the years-long argument between Greece and Bulgaria about where Heraclea Sintica actually was.
