In the year 1835, the month of September, the Ionian ship, Epanteria, arrives from Constantinople to Tulçi (today's Tulcea). On board was also Paryüz the Turk - from Nițel and Moldavian - employed as a sailor and adjutant. Suspected of being a runaway slave or an escaped convict, he is handed over to Turkish soldiers, setting off a veritable cavalcade of exotic adventures along the Lower Danube. In a whirlwind of sympathetic, bizarre or unbearable events and characters, Paryüz becomes, one by one, a muezzin, a trusted man of the cadi Tulçi, a shipowner, a ship captain and the commander of the strangest crew that ever sailed on the deck of a Danube ship .
Turks, Tatars, Greeks, Moldovans, Muscovites, Zaporozhians, an English woman and even the crew of an American ship, crowd into the pages of the novel, jostling to become main characters, fighting for one or more brides, positions of muezzin, to take revenge on a kir captain, a Russian colonel, or some pathetic drunkards who dared to offend some Zaporozhian ladies.
After fifty-three episodes (book chapters), each one more thrilling, spent in Tulçi, Sulina or on the Danube Delta canals, the reader will experience an apotheotical finale, with cannon shots and machine gun bullets against a real ghost ships, crewed by downright (almost) genuine ghosts.