After becoming Grand Duke of Bulgaria, Zhou Chenggong doubled his territory and doubled his population if the Macedonian occupation zone was included.

But it was two different countries that were personally linked by him, and the differences were growing, with Greek and Bulgarian nationalists hostile to each other.

The Greeks even began to resentful of him as a king, and although the territory of Greece also expanded during the war, seizing part of Thrace from the Ottoman Empire, and advancing the border from the Nestos River to the Evros River, the Greek nationalists were not satisfied, believing that Greece had given a lot and had gained little. If Bulgaria cannot be annexed, it should at least get a large part of Bulgaria, after all, Bulgaria became an independent country with the help of Greece. But at the Balkan Conference, Bulgaria received most of its independent lands, and Greece received almost nothing from the war, if any, it was the king's personal gain.

In the era of maturing nationalism, the affairs of the state were no longer the personal affairs of the king.

Greek nationalism was the first to awaken, and as an independent country in the Balkans after Serbia, Greek national identity is what Zhou Chenggong is happy to see, which helps to unite the Greek state, but the narrow side of nationalism is something he does not want to see, because it will exclude other ethnic groups and divide the country.

Even in the Greek peninsula, only the southern part of the country has always maintained Greek culture, the northern half has been Slavicized, and the Ottoman government, although it has brought with it the Muslim faith, has not assimilated Greece, especially in the southern part of Greece, and still firmly maintains the Orthodox Christian tradition.

Increasingly fanatical nationalists, who firmly believe that "Greeks are Orthodox Christians", are tantamount to excluding non-Orthodox Christians from the concept of Greeks, because of the Ottoman Empire's rule for four or five hundred years, there are hundreds of thousands of non-Orthodox people living in Greece, among these people are Turkic peoples who have migrated from Asia Minor, but many more are converted Greeks, and if these people are excluded, it would be too great a loss to the Greek population.

Zhou Chenggong has no religious or racial prejudices, and in his view, women workers who work in factories with headscarves mean the same thing to the country as women who don't. It is difficult for him as a Chinese to pursue a nationalist policy in Greece, because the narrower the nationalism, the less likely it is to support him.

It is not known exactly when this phrase appeared, but the Ottoman Empire also accepted this concept, and even sent it to carry it forward, "Orthodox Christians are Greeks", which is the policy of the Ottoman Empire. It is not necessarily that the Ottoman Empire favored the Greek nation, but more likely that the Ottoman government wanted the ethnic composition of its European land to be simpler, so that the Ottoman Empire had two ethnic groups, one was the Turkic people who believed in Islam and the other was the Greek people who believed in Orthodox Christianity, so that it would be easier to manage administratively.

Zhou Chenggong had also pursued the established Ottoman policy, insisting that the population of the Balkans who believed in Orthodox Christianity was all Greeks, and that the Greek land, at least the Athens region directly under the king, was unconditionally open to Orthodox Christians and attracted a large population.

But Bulgaria's independence has made these policies a thing of the past. The Bulgarians are now Bulgarians, they are no longer Greeks, they also crowd out the Greeks, expel and massacre the religious chiefs of Greece along with the Turkic officials.

After obtaining the title of Grand Duke of Bulgaria, Zhou Chenggong exercised stronger control over Bulgaria, transplanting the policy that had worked well in Greece, dividing the Bulgarian capital Sofia as a direct domain of the king and adopting an open policy. But it didn't work out well, because Athens was a commercial city and industrialized rapidly, and the urban society was a society of strangers, and no one knew anyone behind closed doors, and no one cared about anyone. But Bulgaria was an agrarian society, completely different from the Greek society with a commercial culture. Social development was extremely backward, there were few schools in the country where the Bulgarian script was taught, and Bulgarians were either illiterate or could only write Greek.

Zhou Chenggong wanted to impose the same script and maintain the Greek tradition here, but he was opposed by nationalists, who insisted on the introduction of the Bulgarian script, even if they themselves could only write Greek.

The most troublesome is the lower society, the countryside is a society of acquaintances, there is a natural organization based on agriculture, the land in the countryside was occupied by the Turkic and military classes, these people are Muslims, now the peasants have slaughtered or expelled these landlord classes, they divide the landlords' land property. Basically a rural society of pure Bulgarian peasants was formed, and their xenophobia was so xenophobic that even the Greek bishops could not accept it, let alone the Greek language schools.

The Turkic people of Bulgaria, after all, were only a minority, only a quarter of the total population, and under the threat of massacres, they were either killed or fled to nearby cities. After Zhou Chenggong's army took control of the city, the whole of Bulgaria gradually calmed down after a short period of turmoil. The landlords, who had been evicted from their homes by the peasants, then began to organize themselves to put pressure on the government to protect their private property. But when the uprising succeeded, the government and parliament controlled by the leaders of the uprising refused to accept it. Zhou Chenggong did not dare to support them, even if he felt that the strategy of landlords dominating the peasants promoted by the Ottomans was effective, and he knew that supporting these landlords to return to the countryside would be supported by them, but Zhou Chenggong did not dare. Because that would cause another peasant uprising, after all, he had humanistic feelings, so he also sympathized with the peasants.

He hopes that these Muslim communities will be able to live in the cities and disconnect from the countryside. Many of the wealthy of the past were reduced to abject poverty, and some began to switch to industry and commerce with the small amount of movable property they had brought with them. The city basically did not reject them, and if this situation continued, they slowly adapted to the new life.

But the problems in the Balkans were too complicated, and the nationalists pushed for the uprising, which, after its success, also took control of various important government and parliamentary positions. Even if the Turkic people fled to the city, they were still a thorn in their side. The king's army maintained order and protected the city, temporarily creating a fragile balance, making the few cities in Bulgaria the last refuge for the Muslim community. But the contradiction has not disappeared, and only a fuse is needed to detonate it.

And this fuse was not lit in Bulgaria, but was detonated in the Ottoman Empire, just like in the Balkans during the uprising, and there were large-scale ethnic vendettas in the territory of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire thought that after the siege of hundreds of thousands of the main Black Sea troops was lifted, the rebellion in the country could be quickly quelled, but after these armies returned home, they quickly joined the rebellions in various places. Losing the war, shrinking territory, and financial difficulties stimulated the national mood of the Ottomans, who took out their anger on other peoples.

The Christian population living in the Ottoman territory endured these sufferings, mainly the Greeks and Armenians. Both the Greeks and Armenians were widespread on the peninsula of Asia Minor, and as a people, they came here earlier than the Turks, and if they claimed sovereignty, they had more reason than the Turks to occupy the land. But the territory has never been a first-come-first-served thing, it is a territory of the jungle, so the land on the peninsula of Asia Minor belongs to the Turkic peoples.

The Ottoman racists clamored for the Greeks to leave the Ottoman Empire now that they were no longer subjects of the Sultan. Because of the independence of the Balkan Greeks, they vented their anger on the native Greeks, although it was because of the Greeks, but the Ottomans had never had the patience to distinguish between the Greek ethnic components, and they saw that the Orthodox Christians were all Greeks, so the Armenians were also implicated.

Historically, after the First World War, the Greek invasion of Turkey led to a large-scale vendetta, and finally the two sides had a population exchange, more than 1.2 million Greeks returned to Greece from Asia, according to various statistics, 7.8 million people died on the road, and the Armenians had no homeland, they were considered to have been subjected to genocide, and 2 million people were killed.

At this time, the only remaining territory of the Ottoman Empire, the peninsula of Asia Minor, consisted of about a million Greeks and Armenians, about a quarter of the entire peninsula's population, which was similar to the proportion of the Turkic population in Bulgaria. Since the Bulgarians can slaughter the Turks, then the Turkic peoples will not be soft enough to slaughter the Orthodox ethnic groups.

The 600,000 troops transferred back from the Black Sea region not only did not help the Ottoman Empire suppress the rebellion, but instead fueled the rebellion, and in the final analysis, the Ottoman government had lost control of the country, and the entire national order was in danger of collapsing, causing a serious crisis.

International public opinion is seriously concerned.

The Greek king could not sit idly by, and in the case of Bulgaria, he had already made the Greeks unhappy, and this time he had regained some prestige, and he openly condemned the Ottoman Empire, and any attitude towards the Ottoman Empire would have been cheered by the Greek nationalists, even the nascent Bulgarians.

But what really won the appreciation of the Greek king was that he announced that he had sent warships directly into the Ottoman port of Izmir, which, although it caused the displeasure of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek king declared that it was not for the purpose of occupying Ottoman territory, but for the protection of the Orthodox people.

He declared that Greece would provide refuge for God's people, and hoped that the Ottoman government would help the Greeks to concentrate in Izmir and then take refuge in Greece on Greek merchant ships. The attitude of the Greek king, appreciated by the European elite, also quelled the discontent of the Greek nationalists, but the sudden influx of the population of Greece caused a demographic crisis in Greece.

Hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians, with the help of the Ottoman government, migrated from their homeland to Izmir, and then took refuge in Greece on merchant ships hired by the Greek government.

Greece has a population of only 3 million, but it is difficult to accommodate nearly 2 million Greeks and Armenians in a short period of time.

Historically, in the 1920s, Greece was already very difficult to accommodate 1.2 million immigrants with a population of 4.5 million, and it was also exchanging more than 200,000 Muslims to Turkey.

The Greek government's finances are already on the verge of bankruptcy, causing a serious demographic crisis.