 <p>Find out the real encoding of the source document. It might be <code>WIN1251</code>. Either transcode it (for instance with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconv" rel="nofollow">iconv</a>) or set the <code>client_encoding</code> of PostgreSQL accordingly.</p> <p>If you don't have a setting in <code>pyodbc</code> (which I don't know), you can always issue a plain SQL command:</p> <pre><code>SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'WIN1251'; </code></pre> <p>More in the chapter <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/multibyte.html#AEN32070" rel="nofollow">"Automatic Character Set Conversion Between Server and Client"</a> of the manual.</p>