South Athens holiday villa "Villa Artemis" in Artemida-Athens

Cynthia & Heinz,

We just wanted to thank you for such a wonderful time in Greece. You have a lovely, comfortable home, that we all thoroughly enjoyed. The kids also loved the British Mystery DVDs.

While in Greece, we took the ferry from Rafina to Evia, missed the ferry back and stayed the night. We spent the next day, my 40th birthday on the beach, socializing with a muslim family from Athens. We thought it was unbelievable that Marmari could be just across the water from Athens, and yet, you are a world away in a quiet, rural area. In the evening, the streets were closed off, and the kids rode bikes until 1 a.m. We also drove to Delphi, and to Ancient Olympia, to Kalmata and down to Karmydli, where our travels ended by staying two nights down there on the beach.

We thoroughly loved Greece! Thank you so very much for the use of your lovely house!

Dear Heinz and Cynthia,
I just wanted to let you know how much we enjoyed Villa Artemis during our recent vacation in Greece. The place is just as you advertised it to be. All of us had a very nice experience there as well as in the interesting town of Artemida Center. Pablos was exceptionally helpful in explaining the house and the area. He went out of his way to get us to (and back from) the farmers' market on our first Saturday and also helped a lot with our travel back to the airport on our last day. Thank you and thank you Pablos :)

We had a lovely time over the Christmas and New Year’s holiday in Villa Artemis. Lots of room for our group of 7 with a very large lounge/dining room/kitchen area in the same style as North American “great rooms” which allowed all of us to spend time together with room to spare. We can imagine how nice the numerous balconies would be in warmer weather – even though it was “winter”, we used them quite frequently to star-gaze and to watch local fireworks on New Year’s Eve. We totally enjoyed living in a Greek community – much more fun than being in a touristy resort. The town was very easy to get to know – we were frequently at the Eurospar grocery store (everything you might want) as well as mini-markets that sold any quick essentials, also local pharmacies, and we rented DVD movies in English from a local video outlet. We did very little cooking as it was our holiday – just breakfast and snacks mainly – but really enjoyed every single one of the local restaurants/cafes. We cannot reproduce some of the restaurant names as they were in Greek, but we had great meals all around – one favourite was a Greek taverna BESIDE the Eyes Café – we were there so often that the owner was bringing us complimentary wine and beer towards the end of our stay. Also Hotel Medusa had good food. Our younger family members loved Zio Peppe Pizza and Crazy Chicken (both eat-in and take-out). The Villa is convenient to everything – we found it extremely convenient to the airport which turned out to be very helpful in chasing down our lost luggage – we had a rented car so having parking at the villa for that vehicle was important to us. We had no problems accessing the metro system and made several trips into Athens that way. We also easily accessed many historic sites using Villa Artemis as our base – Delphi, Temple of Poseidon, Temple of Artemis, Corinth, Mycenae, Marathon, Rafina and more – we did have a GPS system which was a big help as it was challenging at times to figure out road signs when they are sometimes written just in the Greek alphabet. We also found our way to the gigantic Athens Mall a couple of times – shopping, cinemas and many more restaurants including North American chains. We would like to return during the spring/summer/fall season as that would be a different experience too with warm weather at the beaches – which are very close to the Villa by the way – and even though it was December, we saw a few hardy Greeks bathing in the Aegean Sea!