A traveling exhibition dedicated to brothers Seljan, the best known Croatian explorers from the age of discovery, opened in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion on Friday, state agency Hina reported. The exhibition, curated by the Zagreb Museum of Ethnography, is scheduled to tour four South American countries where Seljans worked and lived.

In Asuncion, the exhibition is presented in the Manzana de la Rivera museum complex, right across the Paraguayan president’s palace in the city center.

Since the opening of the exhibition coincided with a meeting of members of Croat communities from all over South America organized in Asuncion by the Paraguayan-Croatian Chamber of Commerce, so the event was attended by people of Croat ancestry from Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile.

Mirko and Stevo Seljan, born in 1871 and 1875 respectively, were natives of Karlovac in central Croatia, which was at the time part of Austria-Hungary. Having graduated from the Karlovac Gymnasium, the same school that Nikola Tesla went to some 20 years earlier, they separately went abroad for work. While Mirko worked as an engineer in various cities throughout the Empire, Stevo joined the navy and then briefly worked as a pharmacist.

Around the turn of the century they returned to Karlovac and decided to team up to embark on a career of exploration and adventure. Having walked some 140 kilometers from their home town to Trieste – back then a major Austro-Hungarian port on the Adriatic – they boarded a ship for Egypt, where they travelled down the Nile and back.

From there they reached Abyssinia, where they were hired by Emperor Menelik II as surveyors and for a time lived in a residence called Seljanville on Lake Rudolf (today Lake Turkana), where they worked on defining the present-day border between Ethiopia and Kenya.

In 1903 they left for South America, and spent the following decade exploring areas of Brazil, Paraguay, Peru and Chile. They were looking for traces of ancient civilizations there, and were also hired by local authorities as pathfinders to explore possible overland routes which could be used to connect important trading posts.

In South America they formed a surveying company, Croatian Science Mission, (“Mision Cientifica Croata”) which made maps of previously uncharted territories. They took part in a number of expeditions there, which were widely reported in news articles and books. Over the years they also collected a number of artifacts from Africa and South America, including some 400 kept today at the Zagreb Museum of Ethnography.

After older brother Mirko was killed during an expedition in Peru in 1913, Stevo settled down and started a family in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he died in 1936. His eldest daughter, Zora Seljan, later became a successful Brazilian writer, reporter, theater critic and playwright.

The exhibition scheduled to visit Santiago in Chile, Lima in Peru, and the Brazilian towns of Ouro Preto, Sao Paulo, and Curitiba.