Nicosia: Cyprus search crews have discovered four charred bodies outside a fire-swept mountain village in what the interior minister called the “most destructive” blaze in the eastern Mediterranean island nation’s history.

Interior Minister Nicos Nouris said Civil Defence volunteers discovered the remains just outside the village of Odou on the southern edge of the Troodos mountain range.

The blaze, which began on Saturday afternoon, Cyprus time, outside the village of Arakapas, spread quickly amid strong winds and forced the evacuation of at least eight mountain villages, destroying homes and scorching 55 square kilometres of pine forest and orchards.

“We are experiencing the most destructive fire since the founding of the Cyprus republic,” Nouris said, adding that 50 homes were damaged so far.

Authorities believe the bodies belong to four Egyptian labourers aged 22 to 29 who had gone missing on Saturday evening. Nouris said he had spoken to the Egyptian ambassador to Cyprus and that arrangements would be made to repatriate the remains.

Odou community chief Menelaos Philippou told state-run Cyprus News agency the four men who worked at a greenhouse that grew tomatoes tried to flee the fire along a mountain road, but their small truck veered off the road and crashed down an embankment. They then try to flee on foot but didn’t make it.

President Nicos Anastasiades called the fire “an unprecedented tragedy” except for the destruction wreaked by a 1974 war that split the island along ethnic lines after Turkey invaded in response to a coup aimed at union with Greece.