© LINDOS WEDDINGS 2004-2014
BUILT BY L TRAYNOR WITH THANKS TO SERIF TEMPLATES
DID YOU KNOW?
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Don’t let the name Lindos Weddings mislead you. We are able to offer weddings, vow renewals and commitment ceremonies at a wide variety of venues throughout the island. Although Lindos and some of its amazing traditional Chapels played host to some of our first ceremonies. if there is a venue on Rhodes worthy of your celebration, we are able to make all the necessary arrangements for you regardless of location..
WE ARE VERY SOCIAL
The Internet has opened the door to a number of useful and exciting ways to research and plan your wedding day. Please visit our Blog or the social network sites below in order to find out even more about us……
The groom is dressed by his koumbaro and witnessed by family and friends. He is also shaved by the koumbaro which is known as the ‘last shave”. The koumbaro then proceeds to putting the grooms shirt, waistcoat and cravat on all done whilst the violin and singer play and sing music to praise the groom before his departure from his home.
As we both had been previously married, we wanted this time to be really special and something we both wanted rather than just to please family and friends. We both loved Rhodes and had been coming every year (sometimes more than once a year) since 2006 and decided that we would very much like to get married there. We thought it would be a small affair with just Davy’s Mother, Kay’s daughter, our two witnesses and a handful of friends that lived in Rhodes what with Kay’s Mom and Dad being too infirm to travel.
In 2009, we found a lovely villa with an infinity pool away from the main tourist places that we thought was the ideal place, and thought we would return in 2010 and start making plans. We arrived back in Rhodes in August 2010 with a list of things to do and people to meet, not realising that Lindos weddings were at hand. We had already decided to have a try at arranging our wedding ourselves but local friends of ours suggested we meet with Karen from Lindos weddings as she was the expert and so a meeting was duly arranged.
We met Karen at a cafe in Pefkos and immediately liked her on sight. We thought she was lovely, she was very friendly, knowledgeable and very enthusiastic about our wedding plans. We took her to see the villa we had in mind and she started working for us straight away. She checked with the local Registrar to make sure that we would be able to hold the ceremony at the villa and all this before we had even confirmed her as our Planner! We met with Karen once again before we left for the UK and agreed that we would very much like to use Lindos weddings to organise everything for us. So before we left Rhodes, we had a date organised and a year to plan.
Well we had thought it was going to be a small affair but this was not the case. We realised what good friends and family we had as 40 of them said they were coming, two of them all the way from Florida! In November, we had our UK consultation with Julie, our local Lindos Weddings consultant. She talked us through the legal process and answered all the questions we had. We then discussed the detail such as flowers, food, decorations etc. This resulted in orders being drawn up, signed and sent back to Karen and the team in Rhodes for processing.
December to February was quite relaxed for us as far as wedding plans went. Karen went out to see the villa again and made some suggestions to us about where to hold the different things that we had got planned. Our important job for us here at home was to organise our wedding rings. They were to be made especially for us, with some personal engraving on the inside of each ring.
March and April were then spent sorting out wedding and bridesmaid dresses and flights to Rhodes. Accommodation was booked for the guests by very special Greek friends that own the lovely Pefkos View Apartments, and who were also very excited about our wedding.
May, June and July were spent making some final tweaks and changes to our plans, Karen is an extremely patient person and was very understanding, however we had some good reasons for the changes. We were in the process of having all the legal documentation finalised, (this can be quite confusing and time is of the essence) when we had some last minute changes forced upon us. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Milton Keynes were no longer accepting visitors making personal applications and they would no longer even accept documents delivered to them by courier! Also the Greek Authorities had decreased the amount of time for receipt of marriage documents in Greece. Laurence then stepped in and helped us through this unexpected last few hurdles and certainly helped lower our stress levels.
Davy and Mark, the Best Man left it to the last minute to get their suits. They wanted lightweight linen suits and scoured the shops until the items were found......in AUGUST!! (MEN!!)
All the papers were finally ready, stamped, legalised and ready to be sent to Rhodes, so we were all ready. The time for us to follow them and all head on out to Rhodes ourselves was almost upon us.
We landed in Rhodes on 31 August 2011 and had one week before everyone arrived and more importantly 10 days before our wedding day. Our first week in Rhodes involved getting that all important sun tan, relaxing before everyone arrived and organising food and drink and final arrangements. We also met up with Karen and Cath again, this time in their lovely new office in Lindos,where we went through the final arrangements.
On 7 September 2011, everyone arrived. We did a couple of airport runs and helped settle everyone into either Pefkos View or into the beautiful, huge villa we had rented. The last of our arrivals was our witnesses who arrived on Thursday afternoon. That evening we had organised an ice breaker meal at a local restaurant with name badges so that everyone could mingle and get to know each other before the big day. The restaurant, Philosophia was recommended by Cath at Lindos Weddings and was absolutely beautiful, and perfect for what we had planned.
Friday daytime was very busy. We had last minute details to attend to, some final questions for Karen and we were almost there. On Friday night the boys all went out together for a meal followed by a bit of a bar crawl around Lindos, whilst the girls all stayed at the Villa for a wonderfully girly night - a nice meal and a couple of bottles of wine followed by a dance around the pool.
A reminder of what was to come was provided by the delivery of the tables and chairs in the early evening ready for the next day, it was all starting to get exciting, a year of planning and we were almost there.
The morning of the big day arrived. We went to fetch the meat for the barbeque leaving our villa guests to prepare the buffet!. The beautiful flowers and flowers arch arrived, the plans were really coming together. Lindos weddings arrived early as planned to decorate the villa and get everything ready for the afternoon. The villa has begun it’s transformation from being a wonderful place to stay, into being a wonderful place to be married.
At 1 p.m. Kay disappeared upstairs under instruction from her daughter who wanted time to properly prepare Mom for the main event. It was to be her special day, and she deserved to look every inch the beautiful, blushing Bride.
Meanwhile, guests were starting to arrive and take their places in the area we had arranged to be decorated for the ceremony. Karen came upstairs to check all was well with Kay and go over for a final time exactly what would happen, i.e. the knock on the door to tell her that the time had come!! She told Kay not to look down from the balcony as she wanted the scene that now awaited her outside to be a surprise. Hair done, dress on, BIG knock on the door. It was happening, it was time to make the walk down the stairs, along the path through the garden and finally walk up the aisle to where Davy was standing,waiting for his Bride to arrive.
The ceremony itself was lovely. We had taken some Greek lessons and written our vows in Greek, which we nervously (but by all accounts accurately) said to each other. Michalis the Registrar raised a laugh among those there when he blessed our marriage with children, (we are a bit old for that!). All along we had secretly planned to sing to each other at the end of the ceremony, and without telling any of guests that is exactly what we did, all arranged for us by Karen and the DJ.
Karen and her girls then organised the guests after the ceremony, ensuring that they all had champagne and canapés. She then took charge of the photographer, directing shots in order to ensure that we had the best possible photos.
Eventually Karen, Claire and Cath then left us to it, to enjoy the after party we had looked forward to for so long. After making sure that everything was as we had planned they all headed off as arranged. The party then went on into the wee hours of the morning, a fabulous night, with fabulous family and friends to share it with.
The final task for Lindos Weddings was for Laurence to meet with us on the following Tuesday morning, to take us to the Town Hall to sign the official Marriage Certificate and that was it! This completed our wedding.
We absolutely could not have done this without Lindos Weddings. When we embarked on our plans, we thought we would be doing it all ourselves. We hadn’t even thought of using a wedding planner. Karen and the team are so much more than Wedding Planners. They are with you at every stage, from the earliest of planning process right through to making sure it all happens as expected. They explain all the legal stuff that you need to know and enthuse about all the other little details. They are there on your big day and organise everything and everyone to ensure that you enjoy and don’t have to worry about a thing.
We were first contacted by Kay and David during the later part of the summer of 2010. Although they both knew Rhodes very well (we actually recognised them from previous visits to Lindos) they came to see us after being recommended to us by friends they had on the island. They were in the process of organising a wonderfully unique wedding day here themselves, but had hit a few problems that they needed some help with in order to bring all their plans together.
After discussing they’re initial ideas we were only too pleased to help out wherever necessary. Their wedding day was to be a little out of the ordinary, even for us and we were keen to be involved. They planned to marry and hold their reception within the grounds of a private villa that they were renting and although we had organised such things before, we relished the opportunity to do so again.
They wedding day and subsequent celebrations were a great success, and great fun for us to be part of. You can read the whole story of Kay and David's Lindos Wedding here, written in their own words.
We hope you enjoy it, it really was a fabulous day…
OUR PLEASURE….
We’d like to sincerely thank both Kay and David, not only for this fantastic insight in to their wedding day, but also for trusting us with their plans and inviting us to play a part in what was truly a very unique occasion. As mentioned at the outset, although we had helped arrange similar ceremonies in private homes previously, this was a slight departure from what we normally help couples arrange, and we enjoyed every single moment of both the planning and the day itself. Since then we have moved on to also arranging a surprise engagement party, a number of vow renewals and a baby naming ceremony in similar circumstances and now look forward to performing our first celebrant ceremony this coming summer.
