For the ancient Greeks, Hephaestus was the god of volcanoes.
Hephaestus was a builder and architect, goldsmith and gunsmith, blacksmith and inventor of mechanical objects. He forged the weapons of two great heroes, Heracles and Achilles. His workshop, instead of being together with the other Gods of Olympus, was located inside the volcanoes, where new rock is always created by him.
His cult has its origins on a Greek island called Lemnos, where the ancient inhabitants believed that the volcanic fires coming out of the mountain Moschilo came from the god’s underground forge.
Hephaestus is the god who presides over the forces of nature that in the Aeolian Islands are manifested, in particular, in the island of Hiera, the present-day Vulcano, dominated by the crater that was then active and that made it uninhabitable, and in Stromboli.
