UnicodeEncodeError - Python/Django and Postgres

Simple problem, having trouble working out a solution.

I'm trying to retrieve a multibyte characters from a Postgres database encoded as UTF-8 and then return them, but I'm having encoding issues.

Here's my DB:

   Name    |  Owner   | Encoding |   Collate   |    Ctype    |     Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+-------------+-------------+---------------------------
 articles  | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |

And the data within the table:

                         docid                         |     unigram
-------------------------------------------------------+-----------------
 en_2014-02-09_5eb67dc1927248d7926cdaf72559b57a7f9c017 | Haluk Bürümekçi

The 'unigram' has some multibyte characters. Here's my simplified Python:

def test():
    con = psycopg2.connect(params)
    cur = con.cursor()

    cur.execute("SELECT docid, unigram FROM test")

    row = cur.fetchone()

    try:
        print unicode(row[1])
    except Exception, E:
        traceback.print_exc()

This is resulting in:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

I've tried a lot of different things I've seen, including:

row[1].decode(sys.getdefaultencoding()).encode('utf-8')
row[1].decode('utf-8')
row[1].encode('utf-8')
unicode(row[1])
str(row[1])

All of these and more iterations of similar tries still result in the UnicodeDecodeError. Does anyone know what exactly I'm doing wrong?