Born on July 10, 1944, during the immediate aftermath of the air Bombing of Sofia in World War II, to her father Peter – a son of Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, and to her mother Vassilisa – a half-Greek, half-Bulgarian tailor. Her grandfather Ivan Skander was an army general of Russian-Circassian descent who served under Tsar Nicholas II, and left Russia for Bulgaria shortly after the start of the Russian Civil War of 1917 as part of the white émigré, along with his wife – Ukrainian countess Anastasia Zhitskaya, Petkova's paternal grandmother. In the early days of Petkova's career, these facts allegedly served as the main reason for a ban imposed on her poetry by Bulgaria's Communist Party, although the official explanation was "due to erotic content found in her poems". The ban was later lifted because of Petkova's growing popularity in the country.
