After Zagreb city authorities announced they would name a park across the street from a popular bookstore after a 1940s writer, a local literature association launched a petition to call for more street names to be named after deserving women.

According to research cited by the group, only 1.8 percent of public spaces in Zagreb are named after women, which does reflect the contribution of women to the history and culture of Croatia’s capital.

On Tuesday, the group called the public to support the petition, and said that the park, known as the site of literature-themed events and book readings, should be named after a women author.

They proposed one of the three female authors currently on the list of names cleared by the city authorities should be used for the park, including the ethnographer Mara Cop, painter and poet Katarina Dujsin-Ribar, and actress Bozena Begovic.

Earlier this month, city authorities had announced that the currently nameless park would be named after Enver Colakovic, a Bosnian writer whose most prolific period was during World War II. The decision raised some controversy as Colakovic had briefly served as a cultural attaché of the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia (NDH) – which at the time included most of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina – to Budapest from 1944 to 1945.

Follow N1 via mobile apps for Android | iPhone/iPad | Windows| and social media on Twitter | Facebook.