Eugenios Eugenidis

Eugenios Eugenidis (Greek: Ευγένιος Ευγενίδης, December 1882 – April 1954) was a prominent Greek shipping magnate of the 20th century.

Eugenios Eugenidis was born in Dimetoka, Thrace, Ottoman Empire (now Didymoteicho, Greece) on 22 December 1882, the son of Agapios Eugenidis, a senior judge in the Ottoman Empire, and of Charikleia Afentaki. He studied at the prestigious Robert College, the most selective independent private high school in Constantinople, which he graduated at the age of twenty. By that time Eugenidis had already envisioned the possibility of going to Greece and building large shipyards, on a par with the best in the world.

Shortly after his graduation, he secured for himself a position with a large British shipping house Doro's Brothers and in 1904, aged 24, he became the general manager of the commercial shipping agency Reppen and only a little later an associate of the agency, focusing on lumber trading and his cooperation with the Swedish shipping company Broström Conzern. During that time he created his own shipyard in the Golden Horn bay. In 1923, after the Asia Minor disaster, he moved to Greece where he established the Scandinavian Near East Agency in correspondence with the Svenska Orient Linien general shipping agency, which he had founded in 1907. Through his relation with the Scandinavian and Baltic States due to lumber trading, Eugenidis also became an international intermediate for the development of Greece's foreign relations with those countries. As a result, in 1926 he was appointed consul-general of Finland in Greece. In 1937 he acquired the first ship fully owned by him named HS Argo. Between 1929 and 1939 he was appointed as president of several shipping companies, of both Greek and foreign investors.

Not long after World War II had broken out, Eugenidis had to move to Egypt where he set up a line providing regular connections between North Africa and South America by steamship. Finally, he went to Argentina and it is in the course of his stay there that he planned his post-war activities. He foresaw that a strong flow of immigration from the devastated countries of Europe was very likely to occur, and turned to ocean liners. He established Home Line, based in Genoa, and managed four ocean liners that carried immigrants from Europe to Africa, Australia, the United States and Canada.

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