In 1808, as Stavros Kostis’ fishing boat is smashed into the precipitous cliffs of Milos, he makes an oath: “Saint Nikolaos, I will build you a church on these rocks, and all the generations of Kostis will look after the church in your name. On our lives I swear it!” Two hundred years later, when their ageing father begs them to visit Greece to renovate the church, the first generation Australian-born children of the Kostis family deny that the oath has any power.
As a contemporary, tragic drama of enduring love, strong belief and complex responsibility is played out between members of the Kostis family, they cannot escape the mysterious historical connection between their Greek ancestors and a similar sea-faring English family, the Baxters. In flashbacks the characters find that their own personal lives are connected with the discovery of the Venus De Milo in 1820; the Battle of Navarino in 1827; the burning of Smyrna in 1922; the Battle for Crete in 1941 and the Greek Civil War in 1945.
The intertwined destiny of the Kostis-Baxter families reveals itself dramatically in the current generation when Lynne, a descendent of the Baxters, meets recently widowed George Kostis in Milos. Lynne asks for George’s help in finding the lost arm of the Venus de Milo, which she believes is hidden in the walls of the church. Despite the care she has taken, Lynne finds that she is not the only person on the trail of the precious antiquity.
Set in the Hawkesbury River fishing village of Brooklyn, the sea-cliffs of the Greek Island of Milos, and the volatile seas of the English Channel off the Norfolk Coast, Thalassa, explores the strong bonds and conflicts within a Greek-Australian family and its members’ fateful historical connections with two other families in Greece and England.
Brenda Hall 