He was born on December 22, 1882, in Didymoteicho. He spent his school years in Istanbul, where, at the age of 20, he graduated from the Robert College, an American school well-known throughout the Balkans. In Istanbul, he worked for large trading firms and was involved in the importation of lumber into Turkey.
To expand his business operations, he established a shipyard for building cargo ships in the Gulf of Keratia, and by 1922 he was considered one of the most prominent economic figures in Constantinople.
Following the Asia Minor Catastrophe, he left Constantinople and, based in Piraeus, took over as general agent for Greece and the Near East for the Swedish Orient Line. Scandinavian Near East Agency S.A., which managed its interests, became the largest agency organization in the entire Mediterranean.
To further develop this business line, the company began importing Scandinavian lumber into Greece and grew to become the largest importer of lumber in Greece and the Near East. Eugenides was also responsible for the development of the Finnish shipping line, as well as the Polish shipping line connecting Poland with Greece and the Near East.
Over time, the Scandinavian Agency established offices in all the ports of Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Romania, Bulgaria, and later in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa and Brazil.
During World War II (1939–1945), he relocated his operations to N. Africa, connecting Cape Town with Buenos Aires via coal-carrying cargo ships and passenger ships. Anticipating an increase in the flow of migrants from Greece and Italy to North America after the war, he founded the passenger shipping company Home Lines , initially operating ships to South The United States and Australia, and then on to North America.
At the end of the war, anticipating that war-torn Europe would need to import essential goods, he urged the Swedish Orient Line to build—refrigerated ships—for the transport of perishable cargo, and at the same time relocated all his operations to Switzerland, a neutral country with a well-developed communications infrastructure.
One of his many charitable acts was the generous donation (amounting to 1 billion drachmas) to aid those affected by the devastating earthquakes of August 1953 in the Ionian Islands, and the shipment to Zakynthos of a fully equipped hospital and prefabricated housing units.
In mid-1953, he established the new regular route between Greece and N. America and deployed the first Greek-flagged passenger ship to serve the Greece ‒ North America, creating a bridge that would connect Greece with New York and the Greek diaspora in America.
He died on April 22, 1954, in Vevey, Switzerland, and although his work was unfinished, he had prepared the plans for its future completion. His final wish, as set forth in his will, was to establish a foundation with the aim of contributing to the education of young people of Greek nationality in the scientific and technical fields, as he had observed that Greece lacked a sufficient number of adequately trained technicians in line with the standards of vocational education in other European countries.
Eugenios Eugenides was a visionary entrepreneur with an extraordinary ability to turn his ideas into reality, a vision that remains relevant to this day, and a great patriot. He dedicated his life to his own cause, contributing to his country’s economic recovery and leaving the Eugenides Foundation as a “perpetual legacy”—a timeless pillar of technical education in Greece.
As he himself had said: “Wealth means nothing to me—it is merely the seal of victory—and victory is all that matters to me. [...] "My joy lies in the struggle, and I reserve the fruits of victory for my homeland."