For some reason an old database was storing strings which were normal UTF8 into a table that was latin1 (ISO-8859-1). So the string "međuvremenu" became "meÄ‘uvremenu"
Now, I know there is a way to convert it via mysql query into a normal one, which is:
convert(cast(convert(text using latin1) as binary) using utf8)
What I need is the exact same thing but to do it solely in php, since I cannot temper with this database (otherwise I'd just update the entire column.
I guess it is possible with mb_convert_encoding but didn't have luck so far.
Edit: Do not associate this question with the one that provides mysql solution as I explicitly stated I need php-only solution.