"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 contain the mostly Syrian crowd.
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.
Scores more attempted to reach the border by car, interspersed in some cases with stretches on foot.
Defending the decision to turn them back, Sahin said Edirne could not cope with the arrivals, which have exceeded 50,000 so far this year -- more than the total in 2014.
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"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.
Sahin said local authorities were looking after the migrants, providing them with food, water and blankets. Red Crescent volunteers were also at the scene, AFP witnessed.
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.
Those seeking to reach Edirne cite the case of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose tiny dead body was photographed washed up on a beach in Turkey, to explain their desire to travel overland.