[1] He grew up in a Muslim family[2] in Thrace, and started playing music as a boy, sitting in with his father's band.

He was invited to participate with the band of accordionist Ivan Milev, on the condition that he took up the saxophone instead of the clarinet.

Milev's band played Slavic music and Yunakov eventually wished to return to his roots and did so in 1983 when he started to play with the wedding band of Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papazov.

In socialist Bulgaria, Romani music was considered anti-Bulgarian and consequently stigmatized, and musicians playing it were a target of government repression.

[1] Yunakov is a recipient of a 2011 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.