Sixty years of sending — and a currency that keeps changing the calculation
The first Gastarbeiter — guest workers — arrived in West Germany from Turkey in 1961, under a bilateral recruitment agreement designed to fill the labour shortage of the German economic miracle. They came to stay for two years and go home. Most stayed longer. Many never left. Their children were born in Germany. Their grandchildren grew up speaking German as a first language, holding German passports, building German careers — while remaining, in culture and family and the direction of the monthly transfer, deeply connected to cities and villages in Anatolia, in the Aegean coast, in the outskirts of Istanbul and Ankara.
Germany is now home to approximately 3 million people of Turkish origin — the largest Turkish diaspora in Europe and one of the oldest established migrant communities on the continent (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2023). They are the sending side of a corridor that has run continuously for more than sixty years. And in 2024, that corridor is sending money into a Turkish economy where the lira has lost more than 80% of its value against the euro over the past decade — a fact that changes the nature of every transfer in ways the quoted fee does not capture.
What Turkey receives — and what the lira does to it on arrival
Turkey received approximately USD 10 billion in remittances in 2024, with Germany its largest single source (Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, 2025). The flows from Germany represent sixty years of settled diaspora maintaining family ties, supporting older relatives, contributing to family property, and sometimes sending to family members who still work in Turkey or are running businesses there.
The Turkish lira has depreciated significantly against the euro in recent years — a pattern that has affected not just the headline cost of sending but the rational decision about whether to convert on arrival at all. A family in Izmir that receives EUR-S and converts immediately to lira captures the rate at that moment. A family that holds in EUR-S — keeping the value in a stable-currency token until they need to spend in local currency — protects against further lira movement between the moment of the send and the moment of spending.
This is not speculation. It is the ordinary financial logic of a family living in a high-inflation economy, applied to the infrastructure available to them. Spondula's multi-currency wallet makes that logic practical: EUR-S sits in the wallet alongside lira-equivalent tokens, converted at the moment the recipient chooses — not at the moment the sender confirms.
Germany is home to approximately 3 million people of Turkish origin — the largest Turkish diaspora community in Europe. Turkey receives approximately USD 10 billion in annual remittances, with Germany as its largest source. The corridor spans more than sixty years of continuous economic and family connection between the two countries.
— Statistisches Bundesamt, 2023; Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, 2025
The Turkish lira and the case for holding EUR-S
The standard remittance model converts at the moment of the send: the sender in Frankfurt initiates EUR, the recipient in Ankara receives Turkish lira. The exchange rate is whatever the provider offers at the moment of the transaction — a rate that includes the provider's margin, applied once, at the sending end. If the lira weakens between the send and the spend, the family absorbs that movement without any mechanism to avoid it.
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