He is known to be one of the first book printers in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in all of Eastern Europe, laying the groundwork for the development of the Belarusian izvod [ru] of the Church Slavonic language.

[citation needed] Skaryna was born into a wealthy family from Polotsk, which was then a major trade and manufacturing center of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

His father, Luka Skaryna, was a merchant, who dealt with someone known as Doronya Ivanov, from Velikiye Luki.

Mikalai Shchakatsikhin [be] suggested that the overlapping sun and moon on Skaryna's personal emblem indicates that he was born around the time of the 1486 solar eclipse, which was observed in Polotsk.

In the same year, he rented a printing house from a merchant named Severin[7][8] in Prague and started publishing a new translation of the Bible with his own prefaces.

Roman Skaryna, Ivan's son and Francysk's nephew, actively helped his uncle, meeting with King Sigismund I.

In 1552, his son Simeon Rus Skaryna received a royal certificate, according to which he, as the sole heir, was given all of the property of his father.

[4]: 157 In 1552, after Skaryna's death (and long after his final departure from the country) King Sigismund August mentioned in a letter that a man from his country printed a translation of the Bible and tried to sell his edition in Moscow, but the books had been burned there because they had been produced "by a subject of the Roman Church".

Skaryna also composed prefaces to his editions, in which he emphasized that the purpose of his publishing activities was to help ordinary people "become acquainted with wisdom and science".

Skaryna's editions of the Bible were printed in the Church Slavonic language with many Ruthenian words.

[16] Skaryna's books contributed to the development of the Belarusian izvod [ru] of the Church Slavonic language.

Copies are stored in libraries in Minsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Vilnius, Lviv, London, Prague, Copenhagen, and Kraków.

The language in which Francysk Skaryna printed his books was based on Church Slavonic, but with a large number of Belarusian words, and therefore was most understandable to the inhabitants of the Ruthenian lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the territory of modern Belarus).

see Skaryna as a Renaissance man, on par with Copernicus and Erasmus, whose work in the Slavic lands was a part of the European Reformation.

Streets are named after Francysk Skaryna in many other cities of Belarus, including Polatsk, Vitebsk, Nesvizh, Orsha, Slutsk.

There are monuments to Francysk Skaryna in Polotsk, Minsk, Lida, Vilnius, Chisinau, and Prague.

[20] In 1969, Boris Stepanov filmed a movie "Я, Францыск Скарына" [ru] ("I, Francysk Skaryna") .