Seventy-six people have died and 51 others were injured after a fire engulfed a popular ski resort hotel in Turkey’s Bolu mountains, forcing guests to jump out of windows or attempt to use bed sheets to flee the building.
The fire broke out at about 3.30am on Tuesday in the restaurant of the 12-storey Grand Kartal hotel in the resort of Kartalkaya in Bolu province, north-west Turkey.
“We are in deep pain,” Turkey’s interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, told reporters after inspecting the site.
Yerlikaya said at least 51 other people had been injured.
The health minister, Kemal Memişoğlu, said at least one of the people injured was in a serious condition and that 17 others had been discharged from hospital.
Authorities have detained four people, including the hotel’s owner, as part of an investigation into the cause of the fire, the Turkish justice minister, Yilmaz Tunç, wrote on X.
Several fire engines and ambulances surrounded the charred, wood-fronted building, with white bed sheets tied together and dangling from at least three upper-floor windows where people tried to flee. The firefighting operation lasted about 10 hours.
Yerlikaya said there were 238 guests at the hotel, which is on the side of a cliff and has 161 rooms. Two of the victims died after jumping from the building in a panic, Bolu’s governor, Abdulaziz Aydin, told the state-run Anadolu Agency.
Television images showed the roof and top floors of the hotel on fire.
“It was like the apocalypse. The flames engulfed the hotel immediately, like in half an hour,” Mevlut Ozer, who witnessed the incident, told Reuters.
Omer Sakrak, another witness and employee of a neighbouring hotel, said: “People all started to jump with panic. One friend jumped from the 11th floor – may God have mercy on him.”
Sakrak described how others tried to climb down using bed sheets: “The bed sheets ripped as one friend tried … and he unfortunately fell on his head,” he said. “One father was yelling about his one-year-old child: ‘I will throw my child or he will burn.’”
Other hotel guests told Turkish TV broadcasters that they fled through smoke-filled corridors and heard no alarms.
“My wife smelled the burning. The alarm did not go off,” Atakan Yelkovan, a guest staying on the third floor of the hotel, told the IHA news agency.
“We tried to go upstairs but couldn’t, there were flames. We went downstairs and came here [outside],” he said.
Necmi Kepcetutan, a ski instructor at the hotel, said he was asleep when the fire started and he rushed out of the building. He told NTV that he then helped about 20 guests out of the hotel.
Other hotels at the resort were evacuated as a precaution and guests were placed in hotels around Bolu.
Kartalkaya is located in the Köroğlu mountains, about 185 miles (300km) east of Istanbul. The fire occurred during the school holidays when hotels in the region are busy. The tourism minister, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, told reporters that the Grand Kartal hotel had passed a fire safety inspection last year.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said “every step” was being taken to find out the cause of the fire, identify those responsible and hold them “fully accountable”.
Meanwhile, a gas explosion at a hotel at another ski resort in central Turkey injured four people.
The explosion took place at the Yildiz Mountain Winter Sports Center in Sivas province. Two skiers and their instructor were slightly injured while another instructor suffered second-degree burns on the hands and face, the Sivas governor’s office said.
