Over the hours, tension rises a notch in the small village of Kastanies, in the north of the country. Tear gas jets between Greek and Turkish police officers explode at a frantic pace. In the midst of this chaos, hundreds of migrants and refugees, including many families from Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia, who have been promised Europe, are stranded on these 212 km of land border. They protect themselves as best they can from the unbreathable cloud that invades the premises, while others try to break through the barbed wire walls or try to bypass the Greek police buses parked crosswise to prevent any passage.
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This main border crossing was closed by Greek authorities on Friday afternoon after Ankara announced that it would "open the floodgates" of immigration to Europe. A decision by the Turkish authorities, taken after the death of 34 of its soldiers in the Idlib region, in north-west Syria, in air strikes attributed by Ankara to
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