Friday night, police allowed only small groups of families with children to cross the border by walking on railway tracks to the station in Gevgelija, where most take trains to the border with Serbia before heading farther north toward Hungary.
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On Saturday, about 2,000 rain-soaked refugees rushed past baton-wielding Macedonian officers, who had been sealing the border for three days.
“We’ve successfully dealt with the migrant influx engaging almost 800 members of the polices forces and servicemen, however their number is expected to rise on daily basis as migrants flock in Macedonia from Greece, many of whom are unregistered”.
There were chaotic scenes on Friday as Macedonian police lobbed stun grenades at desperate migrants trying to cross newly-laid rolls of barbed wire at the frontier.
After the clashes, police decided to allow migrants to cross the border freely again from Greece, which is also overwhelmed by the human tide. Majority want to travel through Macedonia and then Serbia and Hungary to reach the EU.
By Sunday morning, more than 3,500 refugees and migrants had crossed into Serbia where they were given food and shelter from the chilly weather at a tent camp in the border village of Miratovac, the Serbian public broadcaster RTS reported.
Europe is now facing a major refugee crisis, as thousands of undocumented asylum seekers from conflict-torn countries in North Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia arrive in Europe, escaping poverty and violence in their home countries.
After reopening the border, Macedonia sent buses and trains to carry the migrants north. Few, if any, want to remain in Greece, which is in the grip of a financial crisis, or impoverished Macedonia, which, like Serbia, is not yet in the EU.
Not since the wars of Yugoslavia’s collapse in the 1990s has the cash-strapped western Balkans seen such large movements of people, when many Bosnians, Croats, Albanians and Serbs displaced by fighting fled for the rich countries of Europe – the likes of Germany, Austria and Sweden.
In Austria, police said 37 people were injured – seven seriously – when two vans packed with migrants collided Monday near the Hungarian border.
“We expect the wave in the next day or two to be of a similar intensity”, Mr Gasic said.
“It is not just a case of Greece not processing those (asylum) claims, but they are actively doing their very best to get the refugees to move on to central Europe as soon as possible”, Kurz said.
Until this weekend, more than 42,000 people, including more than 7,000 children, had entered Macedonia from Greece since mid-June, the government in Skopje said. He said Belgrade needs help from the EU in order to accommodate the refugees.
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While migrants struggled on land, the Italian coast guard said that by early afternoon Saturday, it was coordinating rescues in the Mediterranean from four fishing boats crowded with migrants, and from 14 smaller, motorized rubber dinghies.
