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Introduction
The main apron is the one that immediatly flanks the stair, whith higher steps. The steps are twice the size of those of the stair, so that there is one apron step for every staircase step
the secondary apron is the one to the west of it, a frame that marks the eastern end of the sacred space at a time when the Terrace was no longer marked by the revetment wall which had come to be obliterated by the rapid infilling of the Plaza (Buccellati 2010, 95)
A monumental access to the south consisted of a central staircase flanked by two trapezoidal aprons that widened toward the bottom
What became clear this year is that the staircase itself, as framed by the two aprons, presents a narrower trapezoidal-, or even triangular-, looking shape (Pesaresi was the first one to notice this).
<Buccellati Kelly-Buccellati 2009, 37.
Together, they constitute a single oblique plane: the staircase itself offers a relatively narrow path, while the apron, with its very high steps, provides a transition between the easy access of the staircase and the vertical barrier of the wall.
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Main Apron
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Main Apron as a seating area?
It is then conceivable that the “apron” may have served to provide seating for people looking down towards this sector of the Plaza, in a seating arrangement that has a parallel (structural and presumably functional) in the (later) Minoan palaces, as an embryonic antecedent of the later theaters.
Considerations such as these guide our strategy in a very practical sense, for instance by suggesting that there may be traces, however ephemeral, of Plaza
installations that would have made sense when viewed from the top of the apron looking down, rather than just as markers along a possible processional way leading across the Plaza to the staircase and the Temple (<Buccellati 2010b, 106)
What I called the “apron” was cut in half (longitudinally) because of the loss of its lower portion as a result of the filling in of the Plaza. This loss was made up by the construction of what I had called the “secondary apron.” I suggest, now, that this is instead a widening of the top half of the original apron to maintain, topologically11, the same carrying capacity, so to speak, of the structure. I am assuming, here, that the function of the “apron” was indeed to serve as a seating platform for some event that was taking place at its base, as if a cavea. If so, the eastern portion of the Temple complex served a dual function from the mid-third millennium until Mittani times: for access and for display. By mid-Mittani times, the disassembling of the
staircase disassociated the two functions: while access was moved to the W, display was retained in the E. Thus the eastern staircase was partly dismantled, in a way that would serve seating more than walking, and the original cavea (the “primary apron”) was widened, in such a way that both “aprons” could retain the original display function, in the eastern portion of the Temple complex (<Buccellati 2010b, 95)
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Second Apron
What we had originally considered to be a secondary apron of the Temple Terrace entryway, we can now better understand as a structure serving a very different purpose, and conceived after the staircase and the revetment wall were no longer visible, hence independent of them (Fig. 12). The evidence is as follows. The wide band of stones which at first appears as a wing connected to the monumental staircase is in fact separated by a gap (Fig. 13), both to the east and to the south. The triangular effect (with the acute angle to the west), which seemed to support the interpretation as a wing or secondary apron, may be explained instead as a frame element that marks the eastern end of the surviving glacis, defining closure rather than access (see also
below, 7.1).
In fact, the top steps of the old staircase were removed and access was blocked by a mud brick wall that marked the new, very superficial, perimeter of the temenos (Fig. 14). Such blocking would have redirected any access to the temenos towards the new western staircase of the Temple Terrace, now at the level of the outside spaces.
The “secondary apron”: possibly a memory marker of an earlier structure that would have been operational in the early periods as an intermediate station between the lower and the upper parts of the Temple Terrace (<Buccellati 2019c, 346)
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