Karnicheva was born in Kruševo in Ottoman-ruled Macedonia (today in North Macedonia) to a Bulgarophile Aromanian family, with her great-grandfather being a Bulgarian priest. Her father worked in Sofia and Tsaribrod. Upon the crushing of the 1903 Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising, Mencha and her mother moved to Bulgaria. In September 1918 she went to study in Munich, but returned to Bulgaria after the end of World War I.