in apache, if there is an

AddDefaultCharset

setting (either global or local), it overrides the

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

this may be a problem especially when installing olympus in a subdirectory of an existing site, when there is an AddDefaultCharset setting for the site.
since olympus already uses a .htaccess file, the solution is very simple:
add a

AddDefaultCharset Off

line to the .htaccess, and everyone will be happy.
this was/is a problem to many phpbb installation, even with phpbb-2. the problem exists mainly for non-english sites, especially where that language has more than one possible encoding, adding this one line to .htaccess will solve most of them.