put a django application into production on apache and mod_wsgi and after some minutes a unicode error strikes...

given it worked fine on the development runserver, I was initially looking for a possible unicode issue with wsgi but it was originating from a filesystem access so in the end it had to do with the apache enviromment

uncommented the directive to source /etc/default/locale (which is configured for a .UTF-8 locale) in /etc/apache2/envvars and after an apache restart it was all ok