Germany : German Retirees find the Sunny Side of Life in Turkey

By Axel Wermelskirchen, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

April 16, 2004  

Peter Kaiser has arrived at the place where he always wanted to be. He looks out at the Mediterranean from a restaurant in the southern Turkish city of Antalya, puts his arm around the shoulder of his wife, Nesrin, and asks the waiter to bring the book in which guests can register their complaints.  

The waiter does as told, and Kaiser soon adds his latest contribution. "If there is one thing I hate, it is to be ripped off," he says. "I keep telling the people here: You are known around the world for being such good hosts, and you ruin everything when you gyp the tourists."  

Kaiser and the Turkish hosts, it is a story that the German shares with thousands of his countrymen. An estimated 14,000 of them have become full-time visitors in the coastal provinces of Burdur, Isparta and Antalya . Most of them have put their working lives behind them and want to spend their retirement in sunny Turkey instead of cloudy Germany .  

More than half of them own property. They do not have to speak Turkish because the Turkish Riviera speaks good German. After all, many natives worked in "Almanya" at one time or the other.  

The 53-year-old Kaiser does speak Turkish, though. He lives in Beycik, a mountain village above the metropolis of Antalya where he has built a house. " Turkey is my home," he says.  

Even though Kaiser has retired from Germany , he has not retired from work. He owns a share in an Istanbul travel agency and markets the domain "antalya.de." The Web site offers readers information about hotels, Turkish manners and rug stores that do not rip off their customers, among other things.  

"I'm no dropout from society," he says. "I always wanted to be by the sea." At the beginning of the 1990s, Kaiser took the plunge. He sold off his real-estate holdings, dissolved his company and headed off to Turkey with his son from his first marriage. His life and his marriage to Nesrin took shape from there.  

Like Kaiser, the 58-year-old Peter Brandt has settled down in Turkey , too. "More than four-fifths of the Germans here aren't losers," says Brandt, who was the managing director of a rehabilitation clinic in Germany before he retired in 2000.

With his pension, Brandt did not have very high hopes for life in Germany . That is not the case in Turkey . Near Antalya , he has rented an apartment that has a living room of 70 square meters (753 square feet), a pool and the sea. The rent is EUR400 ($478), a huge sum for an average Turkish wage earner.  

"For most of the Germans, that is the major reason they came: Their German pensions are worth more here and the cost of living is much less," Brandt says.  

But Brandt says his decision to leave Germany is more than a financial one. "I like the mentality of the people. They are friendly, not nearly as grouchy as the Germans," he says. "And when I watch satellite television and see what's happening in Germany , I can say only one thing: I'm glad to be gone."