The migrants who held a sit-in protest inside Turkey close to the borders with Greece and Bulgaria last week, demanding passage to western Europe, have been persuaded by the Turkish authorities to go back to the camps they had come from, a Bulgarian official has said.

Therefore, there is no serious danger of increased migratory pressure at Bulgaria’s border with Turkey in the coming days, Gen. Anyu Angelov, an adviser to Prime Minister Boyko Borisov on migration issues, said on bTV station on Monday.

There are 1.7 million refugees in Turkey, according to the latest data from Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees, and the Turkish authorities hope to receive support from the EU to feed those people on their territory," Angelov, a former Bulgarian Defence Minister, said.

Hundreds of mostly Syrian migrants who had been blocked for days by Turkish riot police and gendarmes in the city of Edirne while trying to reach the nearby  border with Greece had agreed to call off protest. They left the area in buses provided by the Turkish authorities on Saturday night, AFP reported back then. Also on Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met with representatives of the refugees and appealed to them to end their protest by Monday.

Angelov also said that the Bulgarian government is aware of the risk posed by a potential opening of Turkey’s border to migrants seeking to reach western Europe over land.

Bulgaria has no reason to believe that Turkey will open to illegal migrants the border between the two countries, yet the government in Sofia has sent troops to provide logistic support to Border Police, Angelov said.