“It was like the apocalypse. The flames engulfed the hotel immediately, like in half an hour,” said Mevlut Ozer, who witnessed the incident at the Kartalkaya ski resort in northwest Turkey.

Several fire engines and ambulances later 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.

“People all started to jump with panic. One friend jumped from the 11th floor - may God have mercy on him,” said Omer Sakrak, another witness and employee of a neighbouring hotel.

“They tried to climb down using bedsheets. The bedsheets ripped as one friend tried … and he unfortunately fell on his head,” he told Reuters. “One father was yelling about his one year-old child: ‘I will throw my child or he will burn’.”

Hotel guests told TV broadcasters they fled through smoke-filled corridors and heard no alarms.

Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said there were 238 guests at the hotel situated at the base of several ski slopes and which smouldered until the afternoon.

“I would like to share this pain, which is impossible to describe,” he said at the resort in offering condolences and announcing that the fire was extinguished.

“Since the back of the hotel is on a slope, fire extinguishing efforts could only be carried out from the front and side facades,” he said, adding crews began battling the mountaintop blaze about 45 minutes after the first call.

An investigation was underway into the fire, which coincided with school holidays when many families from nearby Istanbul and Ankara head to the Bolu mountains to ski.

Authorities detained four people, including the owner of the hotel, as part of the investigation, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said in a post on X.