Sinti

Sinti (Singular masc.=Sinto; sing. fem.=Sintisa) is the name of some communities of the nomadic people usually called "Gypsies" in English. This includes communities known in German and Dutch as Zigeuner and in Italian as Zingari. They are related to the Roma people.^[1]

Sinti women with children (1941)

While the Sinti were, until quite recently, chiefly nomadic, today only a small percentage of the group remains unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities.

Sinti's believe their Ancestors left Sindh arround 711–714 AD, about the Umayyad muslim Conquest of Sindh, by Muhammad bin Qasim al-Thaqafi. Sinti's languages is called Sintitikes.

The Sinti arrived in Germany and Austria in the Middle Ages, eventually splitting into two groups: Eftavagarja ("the Seven Caravans") and Estraxarja ("from Austria"). These two groups then expanded, the Eftavagarja into France, where they called locally as (Manouches), Spain and Portugal where they called Gitanos, Calo or Ciganos, and the Estraxarja into Italy and Slovenia, eventually taking various regional names.

References

1. The origin of the name "Sinti/Sinte" is unclear, although it bears a similarity to the toponym Sindh (and inhabitants' name, the Sindhis), the area which linguistic and cultural evidence indicates was the likely geographic origin of the Roma, in the Southeast of what is today Pakistan.

Further reading

• Walter Winter, Struan Robertson (Translator) Winter Time: Memoirs of a German who Survived Auschwitz Hertfordshire Publications, (2004), ISBN 1-902806-38-7
  • Reviewed by Emma Brockes "We had the same pain" in The Guardian November 29, 2004
• Open Society Intitute: The Situation of Roma in Germany (2002) Archived 2008-02-28 at the Wayback Machine