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.

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 there 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.

Sinti Media

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  Sinti people in Rhine Province, Germany, 1935.

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  Memorial in Nuremberg opposite Frauentorgraben 49, where on 15 September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were adopted in the ballroom of the Industrial & Cultural Association clubhouse

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  Deportation of Sinti and Roma in Asperg, 22 May 1940

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  Memorial for murdered Sinti in Düsseldorf-Lierenfeld

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  Ravensburg, Memorial for Sinti murdered in Auschwitz

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