The laity's portion of the liturgy is fairly standard in the Orthodox church.
Litanies
"Let us pray for X, Y, Z"
<Lord have mercy>
Standard hymns in the Liturgy (Im going off of my head here)
"Through the intercessions"
"Save us Son of God"
"Only begotten Son of God"
Hymn of the church
Cherubic Hymn
"Holy, holy, holy"
"Axion estin"
"We have seen the Light"
Generally I don't need the hymnal for the liturgy. After 20 years I have these hymns memorized in Greek and English.
If you want variety, that's for Vespers and Matins
Indeed. I really like the worship pattern, where the Divine Liturgy is constant, whereas Vespers and Matins, or the combined service of All Night Vigils in the Slavonic churches, contains the hymns proper to the day. The Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian churches also work on this principle. For example, the Syriac Orthodox equivalent of the Horologion and Octoechos is the Shimo, and another book, the Fenqitho, is like the Menaion, Triodion and Pentecostarion, in that it has the hymns for various fixed and movable feasts.
Likewise, in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the majority of the propers are in the Psalmody. The Coptic Orthodox divine office, of which I am sure our friends
@Pavel Mosko and
@dzheremi are very well acquainted, is extremely beautiful, but it is also somewhat unique in that it combines an almost invariant sort of combination of an Horologion and Psalter, the Agpeya, which contains fixed offices for the different canonical hours, with fixed Gospel lessons which are repeated daily, and the Agpeya offices only change during Holy Week, then, there is the Morning and Evening Raising of Incense, which I believe is also invariant, but more ornate than the Agpeya services, and finally there is the Psalmody, which actually in monasteries occurs at Vespers, at the Midnight Office and at Matins, and that is the highly variable service where you find the elaborate hymns like the Psalis, which are evocative of the Byzantine canons.
Speaking of Byzantine Rite canons, the Syriac Orthodox liturgy uses a large number of them; in addition, there is another type of Qanone hymn that folloes the Byzantine pattern but which was written by Syriac Orthodox composers, and then there is an indigenous Syriac type of Qanone (or Canon).
Sadly, the Armenian liturgy became less elaborate and developed some practices which detach the divine office from the laity; there used to be 13 anaphoras including a Presanctified liturgy in the Armenian church, but now there is only one; it is a beautiful anaphora, named for St. Athanasius and based on the Divine Liturgy of St. James, and the structure of the Armenian liturgy including the Synaxis follows the Byzantine Rite, albeit with a Roman Catholic influence, which is the reading of John 1:1-14 at the end of every Eucharistic liturgy (Soorp Badarak or Patarag in Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian respectively). A curious canon came into effect in the Armenian church which restricts the liturgy to use on Sundays and feast days only, and Vespers and the other offices are only celebrated in the largest and most important cathedrals, like Holy Etchmiadzin in Yerevan, or the Holy Sepulchre Basillica in Jerusalem, which is where you find Armenian monks. So as a result the Armenian pattern of worship features slightly fewer propers than what one might otherwise wish for.
I really wish the Armenian church would do three things: embrace the Coptic, Syriac and Eastern Orthodox practice of using vernacular languages like contemporary Eastern or Western Armenian or English alongside the Classical Armenian, bring back the beautiful anaphoras that fell out of use in the 1300s including the Presanctified Liturgy and an active divine office optimized for lay participation, and finally, make more use of the elaborate, exquisite and unique style of architecture we see in Armenian churches in the Middle East, particularly the Holy Land, for example, in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Armenian parts of the Basillica of the Holy Sepulchre. In particular, the more ancient Armenian churches feature particularly exquisite reliquaries, iconography and oil lamps, whereas more recent Armenian churches seem a bit austere in comparison.
The Assyrian Church of the East has recently revived the Presanctified Liturgy, and the Syriac Orthodox church is working on it, and I am extremely happy about this (actually, the oldest presanctified liturgy was probably written by St. Severus), because I love presanctified liturgies and what they stand for in terms of Eucharistic theology. One of the more disastrous recent reforms of the Roman Catholic liturgy occurred in 1955, when Pope Pius XII “restored” the Paschal Triduum, which meant that he got rid of the common liturgical text in the Roman Mass of the Presanctified served on Good Friday, and the Eastern Orthodox Presanctified Liturgy of St. Gregory the Great used in Lent and Holy Week (but not Good Friday); obviously, these shared a common text, because St. Gregory the Great, who you
@GreekOrthodox of course know as St. Gregory Diologos, became (arguably the best) Pope of Rome, and he wrote the Presanctified Liturgy predominantly used in both churches, albeit on different occasions.
Also, there used to be a Vesperal Mass on the morning of Holy Saturday in the Roman Church which closely resembled the equivalent Byzantine Divine Liturgy, in that it featured 12 Old Testament lessons (compared to 14 in the Eastern Orthodox tradition) that were prophecies of the incarnation, passion and resurrection of our Lord and of his identity, most of which were the same as those used in the Eastern Orthodox church, and the original purpose of these, like in the Eastern Orthodox church, was to be read while the energumens - catechumens due to be baptized that day, were baptized. But Pope Pius XII redid it and ruined it based on various theoretical ideas about what the Roman liturgy had once been like during the Paschal Triduum, and this sort of speculative revision was a harbinger of the more disastrous changes to the Roman liturgy at Vatican II.
