How can I print $submitted in a region template?
The region template has no concept of the page context, so it doesn't know about the node by default.

You can give it that context by implementing hook_preprocess_region() in your theme's template.php file (or a module file), and seeing if there's a node available there:

function MYTHEME_preprocess_region(&amp;$vars) {
  if ($vars['region'] == 'region_name') {
    $node = menu_get_object();

    if ($node) {
      // Adapted from template_preprocess_node().
      $vars['submitted'] = t('Submitted by !username on !datetime', array('!username' =&gt; $node-&gt;name, '!datetime' =&gt; format_date($node-&gt;created)));
    }
  }
}


After you clear the caches, your region template on node pages should have the $submitted var available to it. Obviously that might need a bit of tweaking to suit your needs.