As soon as the first snow is in the air, Veska Cherneva gets down to work. Using a simple pair of scissors and paper, she has cut out more than 5,500 beautiful snowflakes. As a matter of fact, she says her life has always been about… snow.

“There is a saying that everything in life comes at just the right time,” says Veska Cherneva in an interview with Radio Bulgaria. “When I was born I cried a lot. And one night my father couldn’t sleep, so he picked me up and dropped me into the snow. What the snowflakes whispered to me is anyone’s guess, but from that moment on I stopped crying.”

Exactly 10 years later, as a little girl, she fell into a snowdrift, and spent the next five months in a coma. What the snowflakes told her then was something she was to find out years later:

“Around the New Year, back in the 80s, I was really short of money but my three children were looking forward to the New Year. That was when I started cutting snowflakes out of paper, and sticking them on the windows, on the furniture. And when the children came home from school they were ecstatic: “Mum, this is a winter wonderland. Nobody is going to have such a lovely New Year!”

Every year since then, as soon as she sees the first snowflakes dancing in the air, Veska Cherneva starts making her incredible decorations. And she does what is, in practical terms, impossible – none of her snowflakes are identical – in shape or in their elements:

“That is something I myself cannot explain,” she admits. “When I sit down and start cutting them out, I say to myself: No! I have done that before! So, I put the snowflake down and start another one. It is so strange. You never know what capacity the brain has, it is so much bigger than any computer.”

As the years went by, the snowflakes multiplied at such a rate that Veska Cherneva decided to apply for the Guinness Book of Records – for the biggest number of snowflakes. But as it turned out, there is no such category, so it was suggested she make the world’s biggest paper snowflake.

“To make a snowflake like that I have to pay rent for a hall, for paper and other things,” Veska Cherneva says. “At a fund-raiser I took part in with my snowflakes I received an offer for sponsorship, but that man lived in Sofia and I am from Ruse and I want the biggest snowflake to be in Ruse. I have not given up on Guinness, because as soon as I see the first snowflakes in the air, I get my inspiration to start cutting snowflakes out again. I can always make another attempt, I am just waiting for the right time.”

An accountant by profession, but an artist deep down, Veska, now retired, keeps on creating beautiful snowflakes – and displaying them. In 2005, she organized her first exhibition in Ruse. Five years later, her incredible work was shown in Sofia, and this year it can be seen in Veliko Turnovo:

“I believe in miracles, and it is my wish that Bulgaria become a wonderful country, so our children and grandchildren will not emigrate and will stay and work here, in Bulgaria,” says Veska Cherneva. “And I wish every Bulgarian a Christmas miracle. Happy holidays!”

Translated and posted by Milena Daynova

Photos courtesy of  Veska Cherneva