A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Cheremsha (the Wild Garlic Creature)

What this meme means

A creature with a lion's face and rabbit ears stares straight at the viewer, and the caption calls it cheremsha, a plant that has nothing to do with animals. The picture was published in 2020 by a French art project; the name and the fame came later from the Russian-speaking internet.

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Lion's face, rabbit ears and the caption "Cheremsha"

The frame shows a hybrid: the long ears and body of a rabbit joined to the face and mane of a lion, with thick, pale fur on the chest. The creature looks straight into the camera, its expression both important and bewildered, against a plain beige background. At the bottom is a large caption, "Cheremsha," in white letters with a dark outline.

How the image was made is not described in the sources: it cannot be determined from the look of the hybrid. The caption itself turns the strange creature into a joke; without it, there would be a picture with no name.

Cheremsha is a plant, wild garlic (also called ramsons), which is gathered in spring. The word has no connection to a lion or a rabbit, and that is exactly why it works: the viewer expects an explanation and does not get one.

A French art project and the black-and-white version

The original image was made by a person, not a neural network: in November 2020 the French art project Les Créatonautes, which assembles hybrids of incompatible objects, published a photo of a rabbit with a lion's head and asked followers to come up with a name for the creature. The name did not stick then.

Five years later someone found the photo, made it black and white and added the caption "Cheremsha," and that is how the meme appeared. Some publications name a generation error as the source of the picture, while other outlets point to the art project as the author; the discrepancy between sources has never been resolved.

How cheremsha got into Soviet-style AI videos

In parallel, another trend was gaining strength in short videos: generated clips in the style of Soviet newsreels. By April 2026 the two trends had merged, and the creature became the mascot of an imaginary USSR. One notable source of the wave was the account Soviet Life Stories.

In the videos, cheremsha replaced absolutely everything: a pillow, a hat, a flash drive, a household appliance. The narrator's voice delivered familiar clichés: "quietly, unhurried, without fuss," "with gentle confidence."

Besides videos, users generated black-and-white "photos" meant to prove that the creature existed in Soviet times. This is as much an invention as the backstory with the secret institute, but it is what gave the meme its pseudo-historical look.

The invented backstory and stress on the second syllable

A backstory for the creature was invented right away: according to the meme lore, Soviet scientists bred cheremsha in 1962 at a secret institute while experimenting with glass wool. This is fiction and part of the joke, not a historical fact.

A separate detail is the pronunciation. In the videos the stress is often put on the second syllable: "cheREMsha." The word rhymes easily with "ne spesha" ("unhurriedly") and "ne dysha" ("not breathing"), and in May 2026 the musician GAZAN released a track called "Cheremsha" built on this chain of rhymes.