Apatin black panther: a large black cat in the fields of Vojvodina

Apatin sits on the Danube in western Bačka, Vojvodina, near the Croatian border. Along the river runs the Gornje Podunavlje Special Nature Reserve, a floodplain forest later named as the likely hiding place.

Sunday, 30 October 2022. Petar Sladić, a farmer and former hunter, was planting barley with a friend on the boundary between Apatin, Sonta and Svilojevo. He brought seed by truck. Then he noticed an animal from the thicket "that shouldn't be there."

A large black cat. A long tail. "It wasn't a domestic cat," he said. "It emerged from some bushes and walked slowly across the middle of a field. At one moment it stopped and turned toward Svilojevo." It moved very gracefully. It looked at the two men, and left. "We watched it for a long time."

He waited several days before telling the police. He was afraid people would laugh. When the story broke, he was the only resident willing to be named. "I know what I saw."

10 November. The Sombor branch of JP Vojvodinašume, the state forestry company, issued a warning signed by Srđan Peurača. "The predator is extremely dangerous. We urge citizens to be careful of themselves and their loved ones." Witnesses spoke of an animal far larger than a wolf.

Two days later, a video filmed from a window near Banja Junaković, a spa on the edge of Apatin, appeared to show a large beast crossing the road. Spa guests stayed indoors. A crisis team under Nemanja Ivanović of the Provincial Inspectorate for Environmental Protection brought together police, forest rangers, drone operators and sedation specialists from Palić Zoo. Cages, bait and traps were readied. "We searched with drones, cameras and thermal drones, but found nothing," Ivanović said.

The reports moved east. On 26 November, Andrej Maljik was ploughing near Feketić when he saw something black. He took it for a stray dog. Then it ran. "In two seconds it covered 30 meters." He filmed it and spoke of strange tracks in the field. Claims followed from Srbobran and, in December, Kula.

Doubt grew alongside the search. Ilija Drljača, president of a local hunting society, said more than 100 hunters were in the field every day and nobody had seen anything. To the hunters it was a "hunting tale." A game warden confirmed an unusual paw print, but biologist Milan Paunović thought it likely came from a dog. One farmer said the animal in the spa video had too short a tail. Sonja Mandić, director of Palić Zoo, warned that layperson descriptions make identification very hard. The provincial secretariat called the Feketić clip inauthentic.

Others suspected an escaped exotic pet, perhaps the black panther filmed at Kiskunhalas, Hungary, in December 2021. Hungarian zoos denied losing any animal. On 30 November, Ivanović gave his verdict. "We searched high and low and the assumption is that this is a domestic cat that got a little fat." Only two people, he said, could reliably confirm a sighting.

The Apatin panther now sits among Europe's phantom cat reports. No hoaxer was ever named. No cat was ever caught.