Sometimes unlucky travelers get 'stuck' for years in airports around the world (still from the film 'The Terminal')
A little over a year ago, a new attraction appeared at the Larnaca International Airport "Hermes" in Cyprus. Two German women – a mother and daughter – have been living in the airport parking lot since August last year; they have forbidden journalists from disclosing their names. Taking advantage of the fact that even winter is warm in Cyprus, the women sleep in sleeping bags in the parking lot all year round.
According to Novye Izvestia, citing the Greek newspaper Phileleftheros, the Germans prefer to live in the parking lot and use the airport facilities. As it turned out, on August 12, 2014, they were deported from Israel, where they had come to visit relatives. They were expelled from the country after their visas expired. The German women want to return to Israel and are therefore suing the local government in absentia.
Over time, the administration of Hermes Airport began to tire of this attraction. "We are an airport, not a hotel," said Hermes representative Adamos Aspiris in an interview with Cyprus Weekly. The airport administration, as well as the German embassy, repeatedly offered to send the stranded travelers to Germany or any other country for free, but they refused.
Meanwhile, the legal situation is hopeless. The women cannot be expelled because they have not committed any crimes. There is, of course, a radical way to solve the problem: for example, nothing prevents the Larnaca airport administration from forbidding the two Germans from using the toilet and other amenities. But for now, the air terminal is in no hurry to resort to this method.
The story of the German women resembles the plot of Steven Spielberg's famous film 'The Terminal', in which Tom Hanks played the lead role. He brilliantly portrayed a man from a fictional country who gets stuck at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport because he is not allowed to enter the United States. He also cannot return home because a revolution occurred in his homeland. As a result of this amazing coincidence, the poor fellow is forced to live in the airport.
'The Terminal' is based on a real-life story. The prototype of Hanks' character is the Iranian Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived for 18 years, from 1988 to 2006, at Paris's Charles de Gaulle International Airport. In his homeland, he was an anti-government activist and was punished with exile and loss of citizenship. In 1988, the UN issued the Iranian, who had by then moved to France, political refugee documents giving him the right to live in any European country. Mehran chose Great Britain, where he had once studied. But at the Gare du Nord in Paris, Nasseri was robbed.
He could not cross the English Channel without documents. After some time, the Paris police arrested him for vagrancy. After four months in prison, he moved to the capital's airport after numerous adventures. They repeatedly tried to expel him. However, the court intervened, allowing the Iranian to remain at the airport as a political refugee. He lived on a red plastic bench in the corner of the hall, shielding himself at night with two luggage carts. Living like that, Nasseri worked: he actively engaged in journalism, collaborating with a number of publications. Every day he received letters with the address: "Charles de Gaulle Airport." In addition, the Iranian studied: he completed a management degree by correspondence from the University of Brussels.
Life at the airport ended abruptly for him. In July 2006, 64-year-old Mehran was hospitalized. He was discharged in January 2007. By then, his "home" in the airport had been dismantled, so he had nowhere to return. However, Nasseri did not have to beg: when starting the filming of 'The Terminal', the producers asked permission to use his life story and paid him 300,000 euros. Nasseri lived in a hotel – again near the airport – for a few weeks, after which he moved to the Paris center of the Emmaus charity organization, where he lives to this day, abandoning his dream of moving to Great Britain.
But the Kenyan Sanjay Shah managed to realize that dream. True, before that, he lived for 13 months at Nairobi Airport – the capital of Kenya. Having decided to emigrate to the shores of Foggy Albion, Shah set off for Europe with a passport of a British Overseas Territories citizen, which was issued when his homeland was a British colony. The trip ended predictably: deportation home. In protest, Sanjay stayed at the airport.
However, the protest turned out to be forced: since he had renounced his Kenyan passport before the trip to Great Britain, he could not leave. Sanjay fully earned his "accommodation" by cleaning toilets at the airport. There were no problems with food either. He was fed by his wife and son, who regularly came to the airport. At the same time, he went to court and finally achieved justice. In 2005, Shah was finally issued a British passport, and he legally went to live in the United Kingdom.