The origin of the Đurić family he belonged to is a bit more blurry, but it is possible that they hailed from the east, the Shkodër region, where it is known that Vuković also possessed some property, as well where he had very close living cousins.

Vuković and his family were subjects of the Republic of Venice, which had established a corpus of off-shore possessions along the Adriatic coastline – along its eastern reaches, the Venetian possessions cut deeper into the territory of the Balkan peninsula, engulfing eastern portions of Montenegro and northern parts of Albania.

As the Ottomans were pushing through even the last remains of the independent Christian feudal states in the Balkans, Božidar Vuković had migrated to Venice during the late 15th or early 16th century, along with his brother Nikola.

When Montenegro (Zeta) fell to Ottoman occupation in 1496, Vuković fled with Crnojević to Venice, where he earned his living as a merchant.

He joined the Eastern Orthodox Christian community and became a member of the Scuola dei Greci, enlisting as "Bozhidar of Veche, a Serb" after paying his fee, signing himself as such on every occasion.

At the time, Venice was one of the centers of European printing, and there was a lack of Serbian liturgical books in the lands conquered by the Ottomans.

In accordance with his last wish, his body was carried back to his homeland and buried in the monastery of Starčeva Gorica in Lake Skadar.

A few years later the Serbian nobleman Božidar Vuković bought a printing-press in Venice and established it at Obod in Montenegro, from which he issued in 1493 the first church book—the Oktoih—printed on Serb territory.

He later revised it and left it to his son Vićentije Vuković, who carried on the enterprise of his father, and their printing-press continued to work up to 1597, issuing several church books in the Serbian-Slavonic language.

Books for ecclesiastical and educational use had to be imported from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Venice, Trieste, or Vienna, depending on the political circumstances of the day.