Seeking for advice & Prospecting

Hi, out there!

Here is my problem: I'm building an intranet/internet application for
publishing materials (photo & text databeses) and for this purpose I need a
reliable, fast and unexpensive database backend. In this order I need some
advice regarding PostgreSQL.
Here are some technical information/requirements:
- application logic written in Java (JSP, servlets & JavaBeans on
Tomcat, Resin or Enhydra);
- large indexable text fields (somewhere between 10KB and 200KB, maybe
double if I will use Unicode);
- I need to use Easter European (not cyrillic!) letters so support for
Latin 2 character set or Unicode is a must;
- possibility to store image BLOBs up to 100KB in size;
- as I understood, PostgreSQL is an Object-Relational DBMS so is it
possible to store Java objects directly (with the possibility to search fast
their textual properties/fields) ? Or is there a way to store and search
XML/DOM/SAX formatted date directly or using some kind of special API?

Thanks in advance,
Szabi Borbely