In my thesis I will try to present the Yugoslav expedition to Everest in 1979 as reported in the newspaper Delo, and I will also use archival sources to analyse the organisation of the expedition itself.
In the first part of the thesis, the Yugoslav expedition to Everest in 1979 and the climb itself are presented through the newspaper Delo. The largest Slovenian newspaper sent its journalist and correspondent Marjan Raztresen with the expedition to the Himalayas. He sent his columns to Ljubljana by letter and fax, in which he described first-hand the events at the base camp on the Khumbu glacier below Everest, and all the feats undertaken by the climbers on their way to the summit. Although his writing arrived in Slovenia with a delay of several weeks, his narrative style and the way he described what was happening on the mountain presented the events to the readers of the Delo newspaper as if they were taking part in the feat themselves. In Slovenia, Franci Savenc, one of the legends of Slovenian mountaineering, wrote for Delo and became known as the main chronicler of Slovenian and Yugoslav climbs. In 1967, he started his own column Alpinistične novice (Alpinist News) and was its editor for 20 years. He wrote short topical news items about the 1979 expedition, but also some longer articles, including in the Saturday supplement. In the second part of my thesis I analysed how the expedition was organised, using archival sources. The sources are located in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia under the signature SI AS 1176. The most interesting part of the thesis was technical unit 38, which contains the documentation of the Commission for Expeditions to Foreign Mountains (KOTG), which holds the data from the 1979 Everest expedition. I looked at the process of selecting candidates, collecting material resources and equipment, and the financing of the expedition itself.
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