A fire swept through a 12-story hotel at a ski resort in Turkey on Tuesday, killing at least 76 people and injuring 51 others, authorities said, turning an idyllic vacation spot into a smoke-filled nightmare.
The disaster occurred during the winter holidays in Türkiye, when children do not go to school and many families go on holiday, including to ski resorts. It is unclear how many children were among the dead, but some 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 fire. Nine people, including the hotel owner, had been arrested.
The fire broke out before dawn at the Grand Kartal Hotel in Kartalkaya, 180 miles east of Istanbul, sending large flames from the windows and thick smoke billowing from the roof.
It is believed that around 230 guests were in the hotel at the time, as well as a number of staff. Some survivors told Turkish media of terrifying escapes, made worse by the lack of fire alarms or clear fire escapes.
“The smoke was so intense that we could barely breathe,” Eylem Senturk, who was holidaying at the hotel with his family, told the state-run Anadolu news agency.
She and her daughter ran down the stairs to an exit, but the smoke was too intense for her husband, she said, so he jumped from a window onto a lower roof and then into a car to reach the ground.
Ms Senturk said she did not hear the fire alarm but realized the building was burning when she heard people shouting in the corridor and opened the door to see smoke. He didn’t see any fire escapes, he said.
“If there had been a fire alarm, we could have been quicker,” he said. “The lack of a fire alarm and fire escape trapped people.”
Another survivor, Muzaffer Cig, also told Anadolu there was no fire escape. “Since there were no fire escapes, we ran down the stairs,” he said.
Speaking to journalists at the scene, Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the hotel was 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 leaks are visible in aerial footage of the building broadcast by Turkish television after the fire.
Fifty-two of the victims have been identified and 14 have been sent to the forensics unit for further DNA testing, officials said. The bodies of 45 people were returned to their families.
Turkey has declared a day of national mourning.
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 building regulations were met, raising the death toll. Nearly two years later, however, few people have been held accountable.
The fire on Tuesday broke out around 3.30am, when most of the hotel’s occupants were asleep, according to news reports. In an attempt to evacuate, some tied bed sheets together to form a rope which they used to descend to the bottom floor, video footage showed.
Dozens of rescuers and fire engines from surrounding cities rushed to the scene.
“When I left my room, I saw the flames on the fourth floor, the restaurant floor,” Necmi Kepcetutan, a ski instructor who also worked at the hotel, told NTV network. “Then it started swarming towards the hotel. We helped a dozen or more people evacuate, as we know the hotel very well.”
“People were screaming to be saved,” 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 occurred on the same day that an explosion injured four people at another Turkish ski resort in the central province of Sivas, the governor’s office said in a statement.
The reason for the explosion was unclear. Two skiers and a coach were slightly injured, while another coach had second-degree burns on his hands and face, the statement said.