It is a decoding error. Opera 9.52 in "automatic" mode shows on characters with special signs ("é" etc.) strange symbols, too. If I change the character decoding in Opera by hand to ISO-8859-1, the correct characters are shown. Maybe the character set of Illarion.org is wrong, don't know
We are currently reworking the homepage. And in order to get rid of annoying special letters problems we switched the character encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
But we are not done with all pages yet and for this reason some of the not reworked pages are messed up now.