An Orthodox Sunday morning looks like one long service, but it moves in four stretches, and once you know where the joins are you'll always know roughly where you are. Part Two walks the road one stop at a time; this page shows the whole road first.
Before you go in
The first eight stops are places and people, not moments in the service: the courtyard and the steps (Stops 1 and 2), the narthex, the room itself, the iconostasis and its doors, standing, sitting, and kneeling, who's who, and the vestments. Before any of it, while the building is still quiet, the priest has already prepared the bread and wine at a side table, and Stop 28 tells you how.
Matins
The road starts in the half-light, with the dawn service that's usually underway when you walk in: Matins, which Greek parishes call Orthros. It ends with the Great Doxology, "Glory to God in the highest." In many Slavic parishes Matins is served on Saturday night instead, and Sunday morning starts at the next stretch.
The Liturgy of the Word
The Liturgy proper begins when the priest lifts the Gospel book and blesses the Kingdom. This first half is the Liturgy of the Word, also called the Liturgy of the Catechumens, because in the early Church those still learning the faith stayed for this part: "Blessed Is the Kingdom", the Great Litany, the Antiphons and the Beatitudes, the Small Entrance, the Trisagion, the Prokeimenon and the Epistle, the Gospel, the Homily, and the Litany of the Catechumens.
The Liturgy of the Faithful
The second half belongs to the baptized, and it's the Eucharist itself: the Cherubic Hymn, the Great Entrance, the Litany of Supplication and the Kiss of Peace, the Creed, the Anaphora, "It Is Truly Meet", the Lord's Prayer, Communion, and the Prayer Behind the Ambo and the Dismissal.
After the dismissal
The service ends and the morning doesn't: the cross and the bread, memorials, blessings, and announcements, coffee hour, and finally what just happened to you.
The two entrances
Two processions are the landmarks of the road, and both are easy to spot. At the Small Entrance the clergy carry the Gospel book out through the side door and back in through the center, and the Word half of the Liturgy gathers around it. At the Great Entrance they carry the bread and wine out the same way and take them to the altar for the Eucharist. Find those two, and you can find everything else.
On about ten days a year, among them the first five Sundays of Lent, the Church serves the Liturgy of Saint Basil instead of Saint John Chrysostom's. It's the same road with the same stops; the priest's prayers at the altar are longer.1
Notes
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Hapgood, Service Book, p. 64. ↩