The First Ascent of Lhotse by Tomo Česen, Yugoslavia

And here comes the so much dreaded letter X for the Sunday Stampers (ok, Ill speak on my behalf only), or Scrabblers... though the latter can be really rewarding with points if you nail it :) (Speaking of it, I'm kinda terrible at Scrabble... for some reason I just never think of the good words at the time of playing, even though it ends up the best word choice was something pretty easy and common).

Now, for today's edition, I kinda cheated with the X...

Namely, I chose this FDC issued on 24 April 1991 by the Yugoslav Post. commemorating the Slovenian Alpinist Tomo Česen, who had climbed the first solo ascent of South Face of Lhotse (which happened exactly a year earlier), the fourth highest mountain in the world at 8,516 metres. It is part of the Everest massif, and of course part of the Himalayan mountain range. And here comes the catch... namely the Latin letter "H" is transcribed as "X" in the Cyrillic alphabet, the word Himalayas in part of the languages used in Ex-Yugoslavia is "Хималаи", so there you go, it is an X in some way :) Plus, the issuing country does not exist any longer and is now referred to as eX-Yugoslavia, so there is another X :P

Funny thing though, when I googled for this Tomo guy, the third result given by google included the word controversy... so this is where this post got really interesting for me.
Turns out that the Soviet Himalayan expedition later claimed that his ascent would be impossible (don't know why exactly).
He said he had climbed the mountain in 46 hours  and was awarded sponsorship contracts, $10,000 in cash and a national medal. But soon his climb was debunked... probably AFTER this stamp had been issued, otherwise, that would just add to the controversy.

Oh well, he had his hours of fame.

So if you are intrigued to see more X-related posts, simply visit today's edition of Sunday Stamps.