gtk+-2.x and greek characters

[Teardrop Sky <sky icqus dyndns org>]

i finally got symbol fonts to work in gtk-1.2
(after playing with some introductory code for a few days)
but i tried converting the code to gtk+-2.0, and all i get
is a bunch of upside-down u-looking things.
everything i had before was deprecated, so i was trying from scratch
reading alot of docs on pango and glib, unicode, etc...
can anyone help me with some really basic code just showing
say alpha, beta and gamma in greek on a simple label
so i might be able to understand this?
i am very clueless, but would like to learn some of the newer code

thanks.