in reply to Encoding problem(reposting in more detail)
It appears that you've got filenames in ISO-8859-7, so I'm wondering if you couldn't just serve the html page(s) out with ISO-8859-7 encoding as well? This would reduce the number of from_to conversions to the final one that inputs the contents of $passage into the database.
I've not seen your previous postings, so apologies in advance if this is repeating previous comments -hope that helps.
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