I tried to use JayBird on unix (FreeBSD) and all goes well except that
I don't get the strings in Java/unicode encoding. The database data is
(correctly) set up to use WIN1250 encoding.

JDBC drivers for other databases work fine and give correct results so
it's probably not a Java setup error.

I noticed now that even with isql in console no conversion happens and
I get raw WIN1250 data even if my terminal is set to UTF-8 (which
works for other programs) so I maybe misunderstand how character sets
are handled in FireBird. Does any conversion happen between client and
server?

Thanks!