Pandoc and foreign characters

Pandoc and foreign characters

I've been trying to use Pandoc to convert some Markdown into a PDF file.
This is a sample that Pandoc will not convert for me:
# Header!
## Sub Header
themselves derived respectively from the Greek ἀíáñ÷ßá i.e. 'anarchy'
That's just something I grabbed from the top of the wikipedia database
dump. Pandoc doesn't like that at all. This is the error message it gives
me:
pandoc: Error producing PDF from TeX source.
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:ἀ not set up for use with
LaTeX.
See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...
l.53 ...es derived respectively from the Greek &#7936;
Is there a command switch I can give it to get around this? I tried
following the advice to do something like this, but it failed:
iconv -t utf-8 test.md | pandoc -o test.pdf