Some had returned to the hotel year after year. Their deaths — amid dozens of others at the hotel — have stirred grief and outrage.
The first indication that tragedy had stricken their loved ones came around 5:30 a.m. in urgent messages to the family’s WhatsApp group.
A brother and sister, trapped inside a ski lodge in Turkey that had caught fire, were pleading for help.
“Save us,” they wrote, their uncle, Ozgur Turkmen, said in a phone interview. “We cannot reach our parents. There are no fire brigades.”
Within hours, the siblings and their parents were dead.
They were among the at least 79 people killed on Tuesday when a predawn blaze broke out in the Grand Kartal Hotel at a ski resort 180 miles east of Istanbul.
As the fire tore through the 12-story lodge surrounded by snow-capped peaks, guests who had come during Turkey’s winter break for ski vacations and the workers staying there found themselves inundated by thick smoke and struggling to escape.
Multiple survivors have said that they heard no fire alarms and could not find fire escapes. A Turkish engineers union said in a statement that photos from inside the hotel before the blaze showed no signs of a sprinkler system, which was supposed to have been installed years ago.