Greek in perl associative arrays

Mod_perl and garbled text

[stroggoff]

I use mod_perl with my apache server and I have had toubles with the following snippet:

<SELECT NAME ="Time_values">
<OPTION VALUE="&lt;"><%$Before%></OPTION>
<OPTION VALUE="="><%$On%></OPTION>
<OPTION VALUE="&gt;"><%$After%></OPTION>
</SELECT>

<%ARGS>
$Default => undef
$Before => "Πριν"
$On => "Στις"
$After => "Μετά"
</%ARGS>

It should create a drop down menu with options in greek but instead the drop down menu has options in incomprehensible text.
I know I use the right greek codepage, because greek text appers on my pages ,except for when I store it in variables and then display it.

What am i doing wrong?

[jatar_k]

Not totally sure stroggoff,

these are what I could find, maybe something in there will help.

Greek characters needed for web page [webmasterworld.com]
Greek letters (Numeric Character References) in MySQL? [webmasterworld.com]
Getting Greek into MySQL database [webmasterworld.com]
Different character sets in a database [webmasterworld.com]

I know those aren't specific to perl but there may be something helpful.