London (CNN) -- Turkey's government is calling on the United Kingdom to return the head of an ancient marble statue taken more than a century ago.
The object, currently in the stores of London's Victoria & Albert museum, is, says a museum spokesperson, a "life-size marble head of a child, with curling hair, broken off at the neck."
The head was snapped off a sarcophagus excavated in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) in 1882 by a British archaeologist named Sir Charles Wilson, who then covered the tomb over again. He took the head to England and his family gave it to the museum in 1933.