BELGRADE -- No one knows exactly how Muja the alligator survived the aerial bombings that devastated the Belgrade Zoo during World War II or the months of abandonment that followed, but Kristijan Ovari has a theory.
"My assumption is that some keepers were coming with food," the biologist of Belgrade Zoo said of the war that killed every large zoo animal except Muja and one hippo.
"I know what keepers are like. When you are working in a zoo, you get very emotionally attached to the animals." Ovari pauses, before adding, "I could just about cry right now."
Muja in his summer enclosure. In winter, he is moved to a heated shelter.
Muja is the world's oldest known American alligator and is probably approaching 90 years of age.
The Belgrade Zoo’s archives were destroyed during World War II and Muja's date of birth is unknown, but a newspaper clipping from August 10, 1937, shows him arriving at the zoo from Germany. He is believed to have been around 2 years old at the time.
Alligators in the wild usually live up to a maximum of 50 years, making it possible that Muja is the oldest alligator who ever lived.
A family from Belgrade sees Muja in his summer enclosure for the first time.
"I'm still amazed with him," Ovari told RFE/RL. "Whenever the breeding season arrives, he starts to call for females, even now."
Alligators call for a mate in spring by arching their backs, shivering, then letting out a Jurassic growl.
Photos from 1949 showing schoolchildren viewing Muja and a female alligator in the same enclosure where Muja lives today.
Photos held in the Archives of Yugoslavia show that Muja had a female partner after the zoo was reconstructed following the war. The female died in the 1960s, reportedly after a keeper mistakenly filled their pool with hot water.
Muja, with his amputated front right foot visible
Muja survived unscathed through the Nazi, then Allied, then later the NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999. But in 2012, Muja was disfigured following emergency surgery.
When the alligator developed gangrene in his front right foot, an operation was performed by a combined team of human doctors and veterinarian surgeons, the first of its kind in Serbia.
Ovari says Muja "definitely would have died" without the surgery.
Between his weekly feeding times, when he crunches through whole chickens, fish, and rats, Muja barely moves, aside from occasionally snapping at insects.
Some visitors joke that the nearly motionless animal is stuffed. One Serbian journalist captured the enduring legend of Muja in a short conversation overheard between a little girl and her grandfather as they peered into the alligator's enclosure.
"Grandpa, is this alligator alive?" the girl asked.
"I don’t know, sweetie. I asked my grandpa the same thing 60 years ago," the man responded.