A large fire Wednesday in downtown Toronto has caused millions of dollars in damage and left a row of century-old two-storey Queen Street buildings a smoking ruin.

More than 150 Toronto firefighters worked to tame the fire, which broke out around 5:30 a.m. in National Sound, a ground-level stereo store at 615 Queen Street West, just east of Bathurst Street.

By about 7:30 a.m., the fire had destroyed Duke's Cycle at 625 Queen Street West, five doors down from where the blaze began. The bicycle store — a destination for cyclists for 95 years — had collapsed.

"There is no building left anymore. It's gone," owner Gary Duke told CBC News. "My father was born upstairs, my brother lived upstairs. It hurts."

By 11 a.m., the main fire was under control but crews continued to fight flare ups under building material that had collapsed in the blaze.

Toronto fire Chief Bill Stewart said the fire marshal has been called in to investigate the blaze, which he said affected at least 14 buildings and caused millions of dollars in damage.

Toronto deputy fire Chief Frank Lamie said the building at 623 Queen Street West was also in danger of collapse.

There have been no injuries reported as people forced out of their apartments huddled on TTC buses to keep warm in a wind chill that feels like –21 C, but emergency workers were seen carrying stretchers into the building.

Many tenants said they were woken before dawn by police and firefighters banging on their doors. Some were taken by ladder from their windows.

The area largely consists of street-level shops and businesses with upper-level apartments.

Streetcar service for the 501, 511 and 510 cars has been diverted. TTC officials are advising customers to use streetcars travelling along King Street.

The residents of [Palenquero], founded centuries ago by runaway slaves in the jungle of northern Colombia, eke out their survival from plots of manioc. Pigs wander through dirt roads. The occasional soldier on patrol peeks into houses made of straw, mud and cow dung.

On the surface it resembles any other impoverished Colombian village. But when adults here speak with one another, their language draws inspiration from as far away as the Congo River Basin in Africa. This peculiar speech has astonished linguists since they began studying it several decades ago.

The language is known up and down Colombia’s Caribbean coast as Palenquero and here simply as “lengua” — tongue. Theories about its origins vary, but one thing is certain: it survived for centuries in this small community, which is now struggling to keep it from perishing.

Today, fewer than half of the community’s 3,000 residents actively speak Palenquero, though many children and young adults can understand it and pronounce some phrases.

“Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya,” Sebastián Salgado, 37, a teacher at the public school here, said before a classroom of teenage students on a recent Tuesday morning. (The sentence roughly translates as, “Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic staples.”)

Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say. It is spoken only in this village and a handful of neighborhoods in cities where workers have migrated.

The survival of Palenquero points to the extraordinary resilience of San Basilio de Palenque, part of whose very name — Palenque — is the Spanish word for a fortified village of runaway slaves. Different from dozens of other palenques that were vanquished, this community has successfully fended off threats to its existence to this day.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko said Monday that Kosovo independence "can by no means be a precedent. I believe most of the EU countries hold the same view".

Speaking about Ukraine's military presence in Kosovo, Ohryzko said that "it is in Ukraine's interest to maintain its presence in the region. We have already proved our ability to work and bring positive results there"

Ukraine's former defense minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk, now in opposition, said that Kosovo's declaration of independence "threatens the security of the whole world community - no more, no less... In our case it is Crimea".

Crimea, Ukraine's Black Sea peninsular, is a multiethnic region where tensions persist between Muslim Tatars - a Turkic ethnic group - and ethnic Ukrainians and Russians.

"Ukraine has much more favorable conditions for such a precedent than the once prosperous Yugoslavia," Kuzmuk added.