Edirne, September 16

Around 1,000 refugees remained stranded today in the northwestern Turkish city of Edirne, near the Greek border, after being barred by Turkish authorities from continuing their journey to Europe.

“They cannot stay here. Maybe we will allow them to stay two or three days but then they have to leave,” local governor Dursun Ali Sahin told Turkey’s NTV channel, a day after police surrounded Edirne’s bus station to prevent the mostly Syrian refugees travelling west.

The road through Edirne is seen by migrants as a safer route out of Turkey to the perilous sea crossing in overcrowded dinghies to Kos, Lesbos and other Greek islands.

Hundreds more refugees camped out at the main bus station in Istanbul for a second night running after being refused tickets for Edirne, some 250 km away.

Scores more attempted to reach the border by car or on foot.Sahin said Edirne could not cope with the arrivals, which had exceeded 50,000 so far this year.

“Last week, we managed to send back 7,500 people by convincing them not to stay. We will use this same persuasion method,” he said.

Local authorities were looking after the migrants, providing them with food, water and blankets, he said. Red Crescent volunteers were also at the scene.

Many of the refugees seeking to leave Turkey have been living in the country for months, sometimes years, after fleeing the bloody civil war in neighbouring Syria.

With little aid and few jobs available to them in Turkey, which is hosting some two million refugees, many have set their sights on a new life in Europe.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the exodus underscored the need to bring about an end to the war. “Those people actually want to stay in their homeland. But it has become impossible for them to stay... in the current situation,” he said.

“Building walls along borders cannot be the solution to the refugee problem,” Erdogan said, in a swipe at Hungary’s construction of an anti-immigration border fence. The real issue, he said, was “how to stop the conflict in their country as soon as possible”.

The mounting death toll in Mediterranean migrant shipwrecks -- of which Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach became a poignant symbol -- has led to a social media campaign calling for refugees to be given safe passage overland. “No more Aylan,” a group of refugees chanted at Istanbul station on Tuesday.