TEHRAN- His lifelong journey, shared with his late brother Abdullah, took them from the Amazon to the Arctic. They left behind a unique ethnographic treasure and a simple, lasting message: “All different, all relative.” 

Issa Omidvar, the last surviving half of Iran’s legendary explorer duo known as the “Persian Marco Polos,” died on Saturday in a Tehran hospital. He was 97. His passing closes an unusual chapter of Iranian travel and amateur ethnography—one written not in university lecture halls, but on the muddy trails of Congo, the frozen Arctic, and the dense jungles of the Amazon.

I met Issa Omidvar only once, on a spring day in 2025. It was my first and last time with him. Mrs. Mousavi, the curator of the Omidvar Brothers Museum, had invited me to study and identify the museum’s collection of stone tools. The brothers had gathered these artifacts during their travels around the world—from hunter‑gatherer groups in Africa, Australia, and North and South America—and sent them back to Iran. My job was to help complete the object information in the museum’s database. While I was examining and photographing the stone tools, Issa Omidvar walked into Mrs. Mousavi’s office. At first, he was formal, but after I shared my observations about the artifacts and what I thought of them, the ice slowly melted between us. We started talking about the collections and his memories from every corner of the world, especially his time with the Pygmies, the Jivaro, the Inuit, and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. He also told me about his teenage years of caving and rock climbing in Iran. Even at his age, his voice still had the love and faith he felt for his work and his travels. We toured part of the museum together. He spoke with real energy to a few visitors, explaining the photographs and objects. Then he said to me, “I am glad you are working on the collections with such fresh eyes and careful attention. These objects come from worlds that have changed forever and are now lost.

That day, as he walked me through the glass cases filled with all kinds of extraordinary artifacts and specimens, I realized I was with a man who had done something no Iranian had done before: he and his brother Abdullah became the country’s first self‑taught ethnographers of the modern era, documenting indigenous hunter‑gatherer societies long before globalization erased their ways of life.

It was 1954. Issa, 25, and his younger brother Abdullah, 23, left Tehran on two motorcycles with just ninety dollars in their pockets. On the front fender of each bike, they painted their life’s motto: “All different, all relative.” In their museum guidebook, they wrote more: “The Earth is our home, and the human beings on this planet are members of our family. We are children of the world and belong to the universe. Geographical borders and boundaries are contrary to human rights and freedom. All different, all relative.” That belief stayed with them through many countries over the next ten years.

Their first expedition lasted seven years. They crossed Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia, then island‑hopped across the Pacific to Alaska, travelled the length of the Americas, and even reached the Arctic. A second journey, paid for by selling their articles to Citroën, took them across Africa in a 2CV. They made their way through the Ituri Forest and lived among tribes that had never seen a white‑skinned—or Asian—face before.

The Omidvar brothers started their journeys at a time when travel to remote parts of the world was almost exclusively for Western adventurers and researchers. Most people assumed that only developed nations could pull off such expeditions. But these two Iranian brothers, with very little money and immense determination, proved otherwise. Through careful documentation—from the customs of African, Australian, Amazonian, and Alaskan tribes to the changing societies of Asia—they became Iran’s first pioneers of visual anthropology. Their travels were more than just adventure; their methods of recording through notes, photography, film, and sampling were innovative even for their time. The archive of photos and films they left behind is a valuable resource for studying those vanished cultures.

What made the Omidvar brothers different from Western explorers of their time was their attitude. They weren’t colonial adventurers who thought they were superior. Instead, they came as humble learners. Issa once said, “If you don’t take risks, you will never find your true love. Fear prevents discovery.” That approach helped them earn trust where others failed. They filmed and photographed rituals, daily life, and ceremonies among the Jivaro people of South America (known for shrinking enemy heads), the Inuit of the Arctic, and the Pygmy tribes of Central Africa.

Neither Issa nor Abdullah had any formal academic training. They taught themselves everything. They read, watched, and recorded with endless curiosity. Their greatest legacy is the Omidvar Brothers Museum, Iran’s first museum dedicated to ethnographic material from all continents. It opened in 2003 in an old royal carriage house at Sa’dabad and holds thousands of artifacts they mailed home in crates—some stored in bank vaults, others in their family basement until the museum was ready.

Abdullah Omidvar, the younger brother who later settled in Chile and became a filmmaker, died in 2022 at 89. Issa kept looking after the museum, though it grew smaller in its final years. During the recent American airstrikes on March 17, 2026, explosions shattered the museum’s glass display cases and blew the entrance doors off their hinges. Issa was deeply saddened. The damage to his life's work weighed heavily on him. That sorrow worsened his already fragile health, and he never truly recovered.  Still, in the middle of the wreckage, the brothers’ original motorcycle and van—sitting in a glass chamber with broken windows—stayed intact. They looked like symbols of something that couldn’t be destroyed.

Issa left behind no fortune, no company—just a small museum, a collection of photos and films, and those walls badly scarred by the recent American airstrikes on Tehran. When we walked out of the museum building together that afternoon, he said a final goodbye to me and to the other colleagues. Then he got into a car waiting to take him home. He didn't say much after that. But his eyes said enough: the journey never really ends. Now he has followed his brother into the past. The motto stays—on metal and in memory: All different, all relative.