> Greece has now moved into the mix and after evaluating the various
> options I have decided to use the iso8859-2 character set as the
> default one for the greek version of the db.

iso8859-2 is not for greek but for east europe.

> Is there a way to change the default character set say using gbak ,

Default charset is used when creating new objects,
there is (nearly) no reason to change it when the structure
of db is already created.

> Alternatively is there a easier way other than extracting the ddl,
> recreating the db and pumping the existing data over .

It is possible to modify system tables, but pumping data
into new database is safer.

Ivan
http://www.volny.cz/iprenosil/interbase/