A fire blazed through a 12-story hotel at a ski resort in Turkey on Tuesday, killing at least 76 people and injuring 51 others, the authorities said, turning an idyllic vacation spot into a smoke-filled nightmare.
The disaster struck during Turkey’s winter holiday, when children are out of school and many families go on vacation, including to ski resorts. It was not clear how many children were among the dead, but a number were reported by acquaintances.
The cause of the fire was unclear.
Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said on social media that six prosecutors had been assigned to investigate the blaze and that four people, including the hotel’s owner, had been detained.
The fire broke out before dawn in the Grand Kartal Hotel in Kartalkaya, 180 miles east of Istanbul, sending large flames from the windows and thick smoke billowing from the roof.
About 230 guests were believed to be in the hotel at the time, in addition to a number of employees. Some survivors told the Turkish news media of terrifying escapes, exacerbated by a lack of fire alarms or clear fire escapes.
“The smoke was so intense that we could hardly breathe,” Eylem Senturk, who was vacationing at the hotel with her family, told the state-run Anadolu news agency.
She and her daughter raced downstairs to an exit, but the smoke was too intense for her husband, she said, so he jumped from a window onto a lower rooftop and then onto a car to reach the ground.
Ms. Senturk said she had not heard a fire alarm, but realized that the building was burning when she heard people shouting in the hallway and opened the door to see smoke. She did not see any fire escapes, she said.
“If there had been a fire alarm, we could have been faster,” she said. “The lack of a fire alarm and fire escape trapped people.”
Another survivor, Muzaffer Cig, also told Anadolu that there was no fire escape. “As there was no fire escape, we ran down the staircase,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at the scene, Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said that the hotel had been inspected in 2021 and 2024 and was found to have the necessary fire precautions. He also said the building had two fire escapes.
But no external escapes are visible in aerial footage of the building broadcast on Turkish television after the fire.
Fifty-two of the victims have been identified, and 14 were sent to forensic medicine unit for further DNA testing, officials said. The bodies of 45 people were turned over to their families.
Turkey declared a day of national mourning.
The dozens of deaths in a building surrounded by snow-capped peaks where families had gone expecting good times prompted calls for accountability, but such calls after past disasters have not gone far.
After powerful earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people in southern Turkey in early 2023, survivors and engineers accused contractors and government inspectors of failing to ensure compliance with building codes, increasing the death toll. Nearly two years later, however, few people have been held accountable.
The fire on Tuesday started at around 3:30 a.m., when most hotel occupants were asleep, according to news reports. In an effort to evacuate, some strung bedsheets together to make a rope that they used to descend to a lower floor, video footage showed.
Dozens of rescuers and fire trucks rushed to the site from surrounding towns.
“When I left my room, I saw the flames at the fourth floor, the floor of the restaurant,” Necmi Kepcetutan, a ski instructor who also worked at the hotel, told the NTV network. “Then it started to swarm the hotel. We helped around a dozen or more people to evacuate, since we know the hotel very well.”
“People were screaming to be rescued,” he added.
Two people — a guest and a hotel employee — died after jumping from the building, the area’s governor, Abdulaziz Aydin, told Anadolu.
The fire took place on the same day that an explosion injured four people at another Turkish ski resort, in the central province of Sivas, its governor’s office said in a statement.
The reason for the explosion was unclear. Two skiers and a trainer were lightly injured, while another trainer had second-degree burns on the hands and face, the statement said.
