Unicode site title breaks CKAN

We are using CKAN v1.8 and we noticed that if we use a site title that contains greek characters, an exception is thrown:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

In our local installation we managed to overcome this by 'overriding' every template file that used the site title. You might use the unicode() function to output the string correctly