Tsearch2 and Unicode?

I'm trying to use tsearch2 with database which is in 'UNICODE' encoding.
It works fine for English text, but as I intend to search Polish texts I did:

insert into pg_ts_cfg('default_polish', 'default', 'pl_PL.UTF-8');
(and I updated other pg_ts_* tables as written in manual).

However, Polish-specific chars are being eaten alive, it seems.
I.e. doing select to_tsvector('default_polish', body) from messages;
results in list of words but with national chars stripped...

I wonder, am I doing something wrong, or just tsearch2 doesn't grok
Unicode, despite the locales setting? This also is a good question
regarding ispell_dict and its feelings regarding Unicode, but that's
another story.

Assuming Unicode unsupported means I should perhaps... oh, convert
the data to iso8859 prior feeding it to_tsvector()... interesting idea,
but so far I have failed to actually do it. Maybe store the data as
'bytea' and add a column with encoding information (assuming I don't
want to recreate whole database with new encoding, and that I want
to use unicode for some columns (so I don't have to keep encoding
with every text everywhere...).

And while we are at it, how do you feel -- an extra column with tsvector
and its index -- would it be OK to keep it away from my data (so I can
safely get rid of them if need be)?
[ I intend to keep index of around 2 000 000 records, few KBs of
text each ]...

Regards,
Dawid Kuroczko